


Land's End

by Hagen



Series: Salt in the Blood [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: 9th Century, Blood and Gore, Breton Language, Brezhoneg, Brittany - Freeform, Capaill-uisce, F/M, Gaeilge, Gaul - Freeform, Gaulesc, Gaulish Language, Horses, Interspecies Romance, Interspecies Sex, Ireland, Irish Language, Kelpie!Kylo, Kelpies, Mhaighdean-rón, Moving, Multi, Mustn't forget baby Ben, Mythical Beings & Creatures, Nudity, Playful Sex, Pregnancy, Religion, Rough Sex, Seals (Animals), Secrets, Selkie!Rey, Selkies, Shapeshifting, Tattoos, Thalassophilia, True Love, Water Horse, Water Sex, Wolfwalkers, but not in a weird way, faoladh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2020-06-26 23:36:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 51,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19778800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hagen/pseuds/Hagen
Summary: Across the southern sea, Rey and Kylo venture deep into the Gaulish riverlands. Amongst the family that Kylo once thought lost, Rey learns to be what she is from what fate has woven for her.





	1. Deep Summer

**Author's Note:**

> Again, I seem to be unable to embed links to my playlists no matter what I do, so here's the link.
> 
> \- **Original Salt in the Blood Playlist:** https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7rmWZIQeU2otAuwPnBDbrA?si=IWQ1UkW7Slq5fAqJYDFJjQ
> 
> \- **SitB | Land's End Playlist:** https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37W80zQvr7yNmYhv0fFuVb?si=j-n6evUKSgCXuNUwgVeO8A
> 
>  **Theme for Chapter 1:** Two Ravens | Lisa Knapp. Link: https://open.spotify.com/track/2aCEG9AFg6UVJwmxxVtr3Xsi=DhkWfs1WSKqWTbOEwyZ6jA
> 
> So we've finally hit Volume II! I literally could not think of a more creative title, used Land's End as a working title, and stuck with it.

Kylo says that, when a selkie runs away from her horde, she will find a high rock away from everything, and claim it as her own.

It will be the first thing that she has ever owned. It will be the first thing that has ever been wholly hers to keep. She will hide from her horde until the _reungwir_ has stopped looking for her, Kylo says.

Rey listens carefully.

The selkie will sleep for days. The squalling of unwanted babes will not wake her. She will eat as much as she can find. The silence of the night will press down on her like the body of a mate.

Kylo says that this is the gods’ forewarning of what may come.

A water-horse will see her. Perhaps he will see her from the shore, and wonder if she is hurt, or perhaps he will spot her from the sea blow. He will be big and she will not.

He will make his presence known, but will not intrude on the new space she has claimed. He is only curious for now.

She will be terrified.

He will be gentle. This will frighten her. She will not trust him - she believes the stories still. She will think him deceitful. She will think he wants to attack her, the way the _reungwir_ did, only worse. She will think that he means to eat her alive.

She will shriek at him until he goes away. If he does not go when she shrieks - he will - she will cast rocks at him.

He will be gentle even so. He will begin to love her.

The water-horse will bring gifts, Kylo says. He will bring seashells and stones and flowers, great hanks of seaweed pulled from the ocean floor, silvery mackerel and pinching crabs.

He will dare to scale the rock and leave them at its edge when she does not see. He will not push into the space she has claimed. He will go back to shore and find apples and pears and cobnuts, and he will give those to her, too.

The selkie will eventually come to understand that, if his intentions were to harm her, she would have come to harm at his hands long before now.

She eats the apples and pears, the mackerel and the cobnuts. She will begin to love him.

Eventually, she will come down from her rock. He will wait on the shore, and she will realise the size of him and the power he bears in bunched muscles. He will know this, and will sit still and quiet so that he doesn’t panic her.

They will play.

He will lie on his back and let her look at him at her own pace - his hair, his nose, his chest, his legs. He will dare to gently nose at her, and she may slap him or scratch him, only to let him continue on. He will touch her hair very gently and weave things through the ends of it - shells, flowers.

They will transition into intimacy very quickly, when she is ready, and from that day will never leave one another’s side for as long as they live.

That, Kylo says, is all he knows. Rey believes him. It’s more than she knew. She likes it.

Penn-wydh is soft and blue in sky and sea. Kylo says it means _the end of the end._ It isn’t true. South of here is the long headland of Kylo’s birth, and on from that there is who-knows-what.

She asks him, when he tells her, how he knows what it means. He tells her that, long ago, Penn-wydh was home to his kind, and when they left they left a remnant of their tongue behind in two women. They were not right, Kylo says, and liked Men too much. They taught the Britons their tongue. The Men adopted it, and unknowingly speak the tongue of water-horses long after both mares have fallen dead.

The grass is gentle on Rey’s back. The sun dries her quickly. The seagulls are the same here, as if they followed her from Ériú, and they circle above, calling out. Blackbird chases them, nosediving to the sea and averting just in time.

They have been here for two days.

At home, Kylo had seemed different. He didn’t care for her kind, but held himself differently for her benefit; stood up straight, wore a shirt, ate, drank, spoke reasonably politely to others.

He is becoming himself again. His hair has grown out properly, swept wild and curly by the sea’s wind. _He_ is wilder, but happier, and so gentle _._

Rey hears a curse. She lifts her head and spies him emerging from the long blue sea, dripping. She watches him drag a great armful of things up the shore. The dry sand coats his wet legs as he walks. His great bulk casts a giant’s shadow on the sand.

“What are those?” she asks him, as he comes closer, mass shading her body from the sun.

Kylo grunts and shows it all to her. Rey sits up, and he watches her expectantly.

There are shells; cockles and mussels and periwinkles. Rey sees wave-whipped quartz, strange jags of bloodstone pulled from the rocks by the might of the sea. There are unopened scallop shells and half-crushed crabs. Kylo lies on the sand with his back to the yellow sun, puts his head on his arms, eyes bright.

“What are you doing?” she asks him.

“Do you like them?”

“Yes.” She touches the smooth stones. “But why are you doing it?”

Kylo draws himself up in offense. It is the same, Rey supposes, as when Men bring Women white nanny-goats and bulls and linens and white cats and heifers and carved boards of ash to scrub clothes on; strange courting gifts worth silver and gold.

It is the same as rare mates from long bays trying to know one another through a selkie’s inborn fear and a kelpie’s great, loving eagerness.

“For _you_ ,” he exclaims, taking hold of her legs where she lies. His bare chest is all sandy. “Do you like them?”

Rey reaches to brush the sticking sand from his chest. “I love them.”

She realises very quickly that he is trying to court her in his own very strange and incomprehensible way, the way he’d told her about. He had promised, at Lughnasadh, that this would be done properly in Gaul.

She supposes that now is as good a time to start as any.

Rey watches him, amused, as he busies himself bringing her more pretty rocks and shells and things to eat. Rey knows that it makes sense to Kylo, but to her it is almost comical that he is trying to revert back to a gentle and tentative way of being, after all the things they have done together.

She will keep it all even so, and will never part with it.

Kylo’s way is gentler than that of Men, though the gifts are wilder. She is sure that he would bring her linens and cows and white cats if he thought she desired them; he’d steal linens from their stalls, lead cows brazenly out of their fields, pick up cats by the scruff of their necks no matter how they yowled and clawed.

It is so warm and so breezy in equal measure that Rey simply lies on the grassy dunes and sleeps. Kylo is gone when she wakes, but she can smell him still, and he doesn’t feel far. There are footprints in the wet sand. She lies on her side and eats the things he has brought her.

He comes back by the afternoon. Rey has woven sea-asters into an elaborate crown and eaten what feels like her weight in shellfish. He is clothed, almost Mannish, and he is carrying her satchel. It’s full.

“Hello,” she yawns, stretching. “What’s that?” She blinks, realising the bulk of it. “Hold on- is that my bag? Kylo - what’s in that?”

He lies down beside her and shows her. There are two loaves of bread, full of nuts, and a wedge of cheese in cloth. Rey takes the cloth parcel out, and Kylo comments, “Cheap.”

She gives him a look. “Do you know what cheap means?”

Kylo purses his lips and shrugs. He doesn’t.

Under the food Rey sees something shine. She reaches in, and her fingers close around cold metal. She pulls forth a gold coin.

“Coins?”

He doesn’t meet her eye, and lies against her. “Kylo “ she says, and he huffs, pushing his face into her chest and squeezing both arms about her waist.

“Where did you go? Hey.” She pokes him. “Where did you go? Kylo!”

Face buried between her breasts, he says, muffled, “Town.”

“Which town?”

Kylo groans, squeezing her tighter, and puts his weight on her until she’s on her back. “The _nearest_ town.”

“I told you, you can’t _steal._ You’re like a magpie!” She reaches out for the coins and counts them. Most of them are new gold, heavy and smooth in her hand. She has never seen the Saxon gold of the eastern isles before. The gold is printed with helmeted kings.

“Oh, Christ, Kylo, there’s nearly twenty pieces here.” He guffaws into her chest. “Don’t _laugh_!”

Kylo whips his head up and puts his forehead against her. “I _bought_ the bread!”

“But you _stole_ gold!”

“Fuck gold. For you _,”_ he tells her. “It’s for _you._ Rich men don’t miss their gold. Now be quiet, woman, you give me a headache when you nag me.”

“ _Nag_ you? You have some _neck,_ you beast-”

They scrap playfully, stirring up clouds of sand as they roll and tussle. Kylo uses his weight to pin her, but Rey is quick, and pinches him hard to make him double over so that she can roll him onto his back. He wins even so, grappling for her wrists so that he can trap her. It becomes less playful very quickly.

He grunts, and leans his body into hers, laying his weight atop her. It is a wordless question, one he always asks no matter jer eagerness. She puts her face against his.

Rey has been wary of proper lovemaking in the days they have spent crossing the sea. It is not as though they have the space or the opportunity in the middle of the sea, but now they have both. Her seeds are with her, tucked into oilskin on the currach, but she has no means to boil them and doesn’t trust the potency of the herb when merely chewed.

“Can’t,” Rey mumbled.

Kylo rubs himself against her. He purrs, grizzles, and nibbles softly at her ears and her lips, but she resists him still. She wants to as much as he does, but she can’t take such a risk. Not here.

Not yet.

“Don’t,” she moans, pushing his face away. Kylo huffs. “You know I can’t. It isn’t safe. _Stop -_ you’ll end up making a mess of us both.”

In petulant response, he buries his face in her lap. She allows him - and herself - that. It will be different in Gaul.

When it is time to go, Rey packs her mating-gifts into a sack and her stolen coins into her purse and climbs into the currach. “I’m going to swim once we’re out of the bay,” she explains, as he hefts rope over his shoulder. Blackbird comes down when Rey exposes wrapped meat, and she traps her on the currach with a knot around her black leg. The raven flaps and settles, perching on the oar-hook as she eats.

“No, you’re not. Stay in the boat.”

“Fuck off,” she says, but he leans in and kisses her on the mouth so fiercely that she squeals with laughter.

Her heart hammers unexpectedly as she watches him drag the currach down the sand and into the water. His pale bulk disappears into the blue water. The sea darkens as it deepens, seamed with the barest stitch of white foam. 

The land begins to disappear behind them. Kylo brings them south. The air is still.

Rey disrobes under the blue sky. Her shift is light, and she wears no smallclothes beneath it, for ease of undressing. She steps over her possessions, goes to the hull, and dives in beside him as he slices through the water. Her skin prickles.

She shivers, and opens wet black eyes to the new waters and the low, dark deep.

He is startled by her. He comes to an abrupt stop, and so does the currach, lurching forward with abandoned momentum and almost knocking them both in the head. She puts dappled arms around his neck. He’s monstrous under the water, but still beautiful. Rey pats a pale, greenish cheek with a clawed hand and kisses the bare mark she leaves.

She swims with him for as long as he’ll let her. He goes back up, once, to set Blackbird free in search of land. The rope at his ankle is long enough that it does not jerk the currach, and so they race. Rey darts around him in the water, squealing bubbles of laughter when he isn’t able to chase her, buoyed by ten feet to the currach.

She’s faster than he is. Kylo is stronger by far, she’ll never best him with her bones, but she’s faster, lighter. Rey feels the swipe in the water as his great webbed hands shoot out to grab her ankles, but she is always too quick.

Time is lost here. They keep moving forward, but Rey knows not where they are or how long they have been going for, but they do not stop. When she is shrouded in this skin, she follows her nose, follows the soft white whiskers above her brows, follows Kylo.

The sea goes dark and light and dark again. Kylo slows when the dark lightens, and in the shifting marine dawn Rey sees his nostrils flare, gills pulsing. A shoal of silvery fish dart along underneath them.

Forgetting herself, she opens her mouth to speak only to release a cloud of bubbles. Above them, there is the muffled screech of gulls in the sky.

Kylo meets her eye. Rey can see from his face that he knows where he is.

Below them, a forest of dark kelp shifts softly with the lull of the Gaulish sea.

  


The Isle of Hooves is a long, jagged promontory extending past the jut of Saint-Malo. Forest and riverland cuts steeply off into ocean and bay, into grey cliffs white with seabirds. Kylo says that the western waters stir up brewing clouds that hang bracingly over the headland for most of the year, but the summer is deep and green. At its very point is _Penn-an-Wlas,_ Land’s End, the end of land - the end of all land as anyone knows it.

Kylo makes Rey get back into the currach when he knows where they are going. “Just in case,” he says. “I don’t know what’s changed yet.”

Changes could be anything, but Rey knows he means the _reungwir_ , the tyrant males of her kind. They are few and far between, but so are lone _ronín_ with no concept of where she is.

It is beautiful. Rey is startled by a great black beast upending itself into the hull of the boat, and is overjoyed to see Blackbird once more. “She came back!” she calls to Kylo, kicking the hull with her heel so he hears her through the water. The raven helps itself to the stolen bread.

The shallows are green here. Kylo gives up submerging himself at stays at the surface, never still, always searching. Rey tries to stand up in the currach. The sky is deeper blue than Penn-wydh, and the air is still and warm.

From behind a rocky granite outcrop, a small bay comes into view, shod by rock and crowned by trees that Kylo says lead on to the eastern woods.

Kylo drags the currach into the sand. He will not look away from the trees. He stands, staring to the east, as Rey climbs out of the boat and onto these strange new sands. “Britches,” she murmurs, patting his bare thigh. When he wears what she made him, white shirt cloying softly to his wet chest, his wild eyes do not make him seem gentler. He is searching.

Rey’s heart is hammering. This place feels empty, and yet he searches. _How many will there be? What will they say? What will they do?_

She swallows. “What do we do with the currach?” Her voice trembles. He seems to notice, turning his wet head to look at her.

“We can leave it. No one will touch it. Men don’t come here.”

Rey insists on burying it even so, and he obliges, hollowing the sand until the currach fits, and covering it over until only its hull peeks out. Rey marks the spot with three white stones, stuck upright into the sand.

Kylo bends and waits. “We ought to get you a saddle,” she grunts, laying the bags over his back. “And a bridle, and a blanket for your lazy arse. There.”

“Give me those, too,” he insists, jerking his head at the ones she carries, and she piles them on to the rest.

“Can you carry those?”

He gives her a look. “Hold on,” she says, and tightens the straps, as if he is a donkey. Blackbird croaks on Rey’s shoulder, misliking her sharp jerks as she pulls on the straps.

Very suddenly, Kylo’s shoulders fall back limply, and the baggage hits the sand. Blackbird squawks and flaps on her chain. An apple rolls out of a loosened bag onto the sand.

“Jesus, Kylo, what’s the matter with you?”

He is stock still. Rey follows his gaze.

There is a woman standing on the marram-shot dunes. Her hair is brown, and long down to her wrists. Her shift is foreign, a cut Rey has never seen. The sight of her makes the breath catch in Rey’s throat.

A child stands by her, clinging to her leg. Both are as still as stone only for the woman’s hair, shifted by the bare breeze. They have their backs to the high old woods beyond.

The woman lifts her hand. Rey hears Kylo choke on a sob.

The apple rolls into the tide, and is swept out to the long green sea.


	2. Tír na nÓg

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SITB: Land's End Playlist - https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37W80zQvr7yNmYhv0fFuVb?si=7tLGNQqxQpOoeC-s726oMg
> 
> Chapter 2 Theme: Kakhuri Nana | Kitka. Link - https://open.spotify.com/track/6fyYq8nj2dpnRxNyQ1ysj4?si=Hxi7kroUQtu81D3XfbwfaA
> 
> Quick forenote: if any new readers are **creating** Twitter accounts to follow me on there, just be aware that I tend to block new, postless accounts pretty much immediately because I get a lot of shit from darkficcers and people I know IRL, both of whom tend to create new accounts posing as Reylo stans, etc. Just shoot me a comment on here and let me know if I've done the same to you, and sorry in advance. x
> 
> I cut this 15,000 word motherfucker in half. Enjoy x

_ Ben _

Something is very different.

Ben feels it before he opens his eyes. He is curled up in a pile of wolves, black and white and grey, and before he blinks he can feel a strange lightness in his shoulders, his feet. 

The morning is clear and the sky is blue when Leia wakes him up, stepping over wolves to get to him. They are shaded by the green forest. There is a magpie chittering to its mate in the trees above. The others are still asleep, a little way away, in and around the rudimentary stick-and-muck longhouse, in the trees, on the riverbank.

“ _ Carwen _ ,” she murmurs. “Ben - wake up,  _ ebeul. _ ” She shakes him gently, and he stretches his arms above his head and yawns, deaf for a moment in the span of it. There is a pup lying on the fox fur that he wears about his shoulders, and Leia shifts it as it squeaks. The wolves rise when Ben does, yawning and stretching, paws down and haunches up, licking at his face and his hands. He has so many now, almost twelve, and they would follow him to the ends of the earth.

He walks north, hand-in-hand with Leia, through the cool morning. They are both barefoot. The heat thickens quickly in the forest, held in by every leaf like wool. The ground is dry underfoot.

“Where are we going,  _ mamm-gozh _ ?” he asks her, though he knows. He can feel it in his chest. It’s shimmering and green.

“To the bay, sweetpea.”

The biggest wolves trail behind them, watchful, and the younger, more skittish beasts flank them on both sides, leaning on their legs when they try to walk. The pups race ahead, chasing early-morning moths and white butterflies the colour of cabbage-hearts. Around them, the forest is alive with sound.

They walk and walk. The trees are thinning now. The sea is near. Leia stops and looks at the wolves following.

“Make them stay, Ben.”

He does. He pushes their muzzles away when they cry and whine, and commands, “Wait. Stay - wait!”

They do. They whine, they protest, but they lie down. Some sit. The pups climb all over their elders. Ben follows Leia to the edge of the wood. They come clear of the trees hand-in-hand, and do not stop until they reach the high dunes before the damp sand of the bay.

It is clear and blue. The sky is soft. The waves crash, but not fiercely. Salt in his lungs is so rare now - he has become accustomed to the air blowing down from the mountains, the fog on the river. He inhales and exhales, goosebumps rising on his skin. 

Leia goes still where she stands, and does not move. He looks up at her, and her eyes are never still, watching over the bay. Ben leans against her leg, arms about her waist, hands fisted in the bodice of her dress. 

He wonders if it is time, if it is now. He has waited for so long. It feels like centuries since Leia told him the truth - that his father was not dead, just wandering, and coming home. His grandmother is special, like his father - she can see things before they happen and feel people in the air before they arrive.

They wait for a long time. The air grows warm as the hours pass. Leia stays standing, immovable. Ben leans against her calf and watches, too.

She inhales sharply all of a sudden. Ben hear’s a raven’s call.

There he is, rising from the water the way Ben has remembered and pictured in his head countless times. His heart begins to hammer and something cold-but-warm prickles at his skin. 

There he is.  _ Tadig. _

His father is so big, so tall, his hair long and dark, his eyes big and black. Ben stifles a low sound. He starts as if meaning to run to him, but he has not seen them yet. His father drags a boat behind him, like the ones Men ride on the river, easy to knock over.

There is someone in the boat. Ben stares. It’s a girl. He doesn’t know her. She’s small, skinny, and not like his father, but not Men either. 

His father sees them, and goes still and stony. His eyes find Ben’s, and Ben begins to cry.

_ Kylo _

He remembers, years ago, when Ben was just a baby, and how when he cried for milk it broke Kylo’s heart. He could have wept at the sound of the child squalling.

This is worse. He can see his foal’s face, red with emotion and wet with tears, saying nothing. This is worse than the stormy night when both he and Mina were lost, screaming in terror. He is simply silent, clinging to Leia’s leg as though fearful of those at the bottom of the dunes.

_ Mammig. _

His mother has not changed. Her hair shifts in the breeze. Her lip is trembling and her eyes are wet. Kylo feels a child again, frightened at the sight of his mother’s tears.

Rey is still and stony beside him. He lets his hand touch hers as he takes a step forward. The dunes are not as steep as he remembers. The winds have worn them down over the long years.

He goes to them both. Ben hides behind Leia as if in fear at the great, forgotten bulk of his giant father. Kylo can scarcely speak for the pain of it. He tries, deeply, desperately. His mother lifts her hand. She cries freely now. The foal in Kylo cries, too, and now his eyes are stinging, his throat feels thick. His face is wet and warm.

Leia touches his face, hand trembling. Her fingers pass over the strange scar, the damage of it and its refusal to heal. “ _ Ebeul, _ ” she whispers. The heat of her hand shocks him, like lightning splitting the trunk of a tree, white-hot. She is real, not something he has dreamt or seen behind his eyes as he remembers. “Kylo.” She takes his face and puts her forehead to his, and they both shake.

“Are you real?” she asks him, barely audible. “Are you real,  _ ebeul _ ? Are you home?”

He covers her hands with his, and she gasps. “ _ Eo, _ ” Leia breathes. “You are. You are.” Her face crumples and she seizes him suddenly, throwing both arms around his neck so tightly she could choke him. He bends and crushes her to him, and sobs like a child.

Ben whimpers at Leia’s other side, clinging to the waist of her dress. When Kylo lets go, the child stares at him, eyes searching. Kylo drops to his knees. He feels shaky, unsteady.

“Do you know me, boy?” he asks the child, chest racked with tears.

Ben is so perfect that to see him cry would shatter the stoniest heart. His eyes are so pale, like his mother’s, and when they are full of tears the stony heart would move earth and Otherworld to dry them.

The sea’s wind pushes Ben’s dark curls over his eyes, and he pushes them back. He takes a deep breath, little chest rising. Slowly, he reaches out with both hands. His lower lip is trembling. Kylo lets him inch closer and closer, steps tentative.

When his hands brush Kylo’s chest - another lightning bolt down Kylo’s skin - Ben takes another deep, ragged breath and whispers, “ _ Tadig.” _

__ He crushes himself against his father, clinging to his neck as fiercely as Leia did, and sobs bitterly.

_ My son,  _ he thinks.  _ My foal,  _ **_ma ebeul_ ** _ , my boy. _

Ben has grown. His kind develop quickly until the advent of their manhood or their womanhood, and Ben has grown. His years will slow soon. Kylo can tell. He wears rough britches - either stolen from Men or lovingly hewn by one of the others - and a fox’s pelt about his small shoulders, starkly red against his skin. About his neck he wears his wolf’s teeth still, more teeth strung on it than Kylo remembers. They dig into Kylo’s skin with the force of Ben’s crushing, desperate embrace.

“Look at me, boy,” Kylo manages. “Look at me.”

Ben refuses, sobbing, and Kylo stands with the child clinging to him. All he can smell is the boy- wolf and honey, clawed from the hive, and hot summer earth - and the salt of the water around them.

  
  


_ Rey _

Rey feels like Oisín. She has crossed the long sea on a great horse, to the isle of the beautiful and the undying, and now she is faced with two of them.

Kylo has the child in his arms, who cries horribly, heartbroken. His little cries sound like the howls of a young wolf. His mother has her arms about them both. All three shake and cry. The sight alone is heartbreaking. Rey knows not what to do. Blackbird protests and worries at her tiny shackles on the oarhooks.

Even Leia’s - that’s her name, Leia, Rey is sure, Kylo told her long ago - face is almost imperceptibly lined. She’s impossible to look away from, as lovely as Rey had imagined her. Her eyes are dark like Kylo’s, her cheekbones as high and as sharp. Her hair is loose and braid-kinked. She smiles a tearful smile at Rey, as though she knows her, and holds out her hand so that Rey will come to them. The dunes are less dense than they look, and so Rey’s calves burn as she climbs them, but Leia reaches out and takes her hand, as warm as Kylo’s.

Kylo turns so that Rey can see the child. He has his face pressed into Kylo’s shoulder, but when Rey steps tentatively closer, he lifts it. At first she only sees wet eyes, but as she comes closer he looks her dead in the face. 

She stops, and very suddenly feels rooted to the dunes like the rough grass. The waves crash behind them, impossibly blue in the sun.

Rey has never seen such a beautiful child in all her life. 

Raven-dark curls don’t hide his large ears. They protrude through the black locks like perfect shells. He is every bit his father’ image; they pout in the same way, sullen and childish. Their gaze is the same, deep and burning. 

Where Kylo’s eyes are dark, Ben’s are grey as winter skies, large and long-lashed and searching.

Ben is angelic in his childlike beauty. He leans on Kylo’s shoulder and stares at her with those large, queer eyes. When the wind blows his dark hair into his face, he brushes it boldly from his cheek, almost slapping himself with the indignance of his hand. 

Rey cannot not look away. She understands now. She understands why grown and sensible Men and Women are drawn into dark water by strange and ancient children, so lovely it makes one’s heart ache. She understands why human children meet vile fates at the hands of children like Ben, their faces so beautiful and so vulnerable that they could never be taken for anything but a friend.

She should hate him for that, but she doesn’t. He is so beautiful. He could be seven or eight or nine, barely grown, though she knows that he is far older, even if his child’s body and child’s mind are immovable to time’s unending pace.

Ben is sniffing the air between them. Not once does he look away. 

Leia comes to Kylo’s side and reaches up to stroke Ben’s hair. “Don’t be frightened, sweetheart.”

Rey finds herself extending her hand - surely the child won’t take it - as though she is quieting an animal. Ben’s eyes go wide. 

So quickly that Kylo cannot stop him, he hefts himself up with both hands deep in Kylo’s shoulder, chest protruding in rage. Rey’s hand goes still where she holds it. The child pulls back his lip and hisses at her like a wildcat, pink mouth full of snowy sharp teeth. She snatches her hand back in shock, and Kylo pulls Ben down against his chest as he swipes the air in an attempt to scratch her.

“ _ Don’t _ do that.  _ Ebeul -  _ stop,” Kylo warns, rocking him, too weary to reprimand the boy. Ben hides his face in Kylo’s hair and cries. 

Leia takes Rey’s hand, looks at it as though examining it for a wound. She raises her head to Kylo, and takes his hand, too. “ _ Kas eñ, _ ” Leia tells him, and he bends his head to touch hers. Ben clings tight about Kylo’s neck as he bends. Rey catches a glimpse of hateful, teary grey eyes boring into her own before Kylo straightens up. 

“ _ Kas eñ, hag kousk mat _ .  _ Me diwall Rey. _ ”

Kylo puts his head to Rey’s next, as he often does, and kisses her forehead briefly. Ben makes a furious muffled sound, and so he pulls back lest the child makes to attack her again. “Stay,” he whispers, “I won’t be long.”

And he is gone, carrying his child up the dunes and into the trees.

Rey feels very lost. She is in a place she knows not, with a woman she knows about only from Kylo’s musings, and so all she can do is stand, waiting, her heart hammering in her chest.

The first thing Leia says to her directly is, “You’re very beautiful.” Her voice is kind and tear-shaken, her words a tentative mix of fluent Gaulish and uncertain Gaelic.

Rey goes pink and answers her as best she can. “Thank you.”

“Ben will come around. He’s still so little. Let him know his father again, and he’ll learn to love you.”

Rey nods. The trees loom so high and so dark here, standing sentinel over the bay. She feels exposed, alone.

“Come,” Leia says.

Hesitance strikes her. Everything is foreign. “Where?”

“Inland. They’ll find us there. Let your raven go, she’ll find you again.”

Rey does. Blackbird shoots off without a second glance, straight into the trees. Without Rey asking, Leia hefts the heaviest of packs onto her own back. “I can carry those,” Rey insists, but Leia straightens up, strong. They share the load, and Rey follows her through the strange almost-gate that the immovable oaks form between the forest and the bay.

Gaul is so green.

The light spurns darker in the trees, but the gaps between them shutter sunlight through so bright that Rey must squint against the glare of it on glossy leaves. She can feel strange life under her booted feet. There are no Men here, she knows. This place feels too lost, too good to be besmirched by them.

“I saw you before you found him,” Leia says.

Rey starts, stammers. She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t know how to talk about the Sight with anyone but Kylo - Kylo finds her misgivings amusing, comforts her when it frustrates her - but she can scarcely curse and gripe in front of Leia. “I saw you coming to Penn an Wlas before Kylo knew that we were still here,” Leia tells her. She leads Rey over a stream, stepping from stone to stone. It smells so clear, Rey thinks, and within it writhe little minnows in the white water. “I saw you in your boat-of-Men, and I saw you following me with your pack. Did you see any of that?”

“No,” Rey says. “I saw nothing.”

“But you  _ have  _ seen something of Gaul.”

It isn’t a question. Rey has. The dream - the dream where she saw Aengus still well and living, the dream of the seal paws dragging her into the sea, and a dream of children playing by the riverside, a dark-haired boy calling her name from the bank and diving in on top of her.

“ _ Oh, _ ” Rey says, breathless in her realisation. Leia is smiling in the way that people do when they know that they are right.

“You see?” she asks. “He’ll learn to love you. Give him time.”

“How did you see what I dreamt?”

“How did you see what Kylo dreamt when I called him to come back to us?” Leia counters. “You are more powerful than you think,  _ reunig. _ ”

They do not speak for the rest of the way, save for Leia’s gentle, ‘this way,’ or ‘stay on behind me.’ Rey follows Leia over brook and stream, over bridges of stacked stick and stone, over grassy banks groaning with the weight of wood-flower and mushrooms. 

Rey smells the stink of wolf and hears its vile snarl before she sees it. She whips around, and in her terror almost throws her pack aside. 

“Peace,” Leia says. 

There are more wolves here than ever she has seen in one place. They stare, interested, but do not approach her, congregated in a huddled pack. There are old males with grey muzzles and young lanky pups. Some have strings of shells about their thick necks, half-hidden by their fur. 

“They belong to Ben,” Leia says.

Rey remembers Kylo’s sight-dream, of Ben’s teary eyes and the dark shadow of a wolf’s panting mouth. “ _ Oh.” _

“They won’t hurt you. No one here will. Don’t be frightened.”

The trees clear as they go on. The wolves follow. They weave in and out, some by Leia, some by Rey. Rey lets them sniff, and one pale she-wolf leans on her as she walks. This would have horrified her, once.

She can hear running water. She can hear talking, laughter, and smell smoke. Leia goes faster, bare feet impossibly dexterous across fallen trees. Rey follows her path, and when they come clear of a great fallen oak Rey comes to a stop. She can see the shine and run of the river beyond, smell its fresh rush. Birds are singing. The sun shines down yellow-and-gold. There are  _ people  _ here.

She wonders if all the tales of Tír na nÓg have been born thus. In all the stories, a sea is crossed on a slender white horse to reach it, and those who live upon it are godlike and golden. 

There is a strange longhouse in the middle of a natural clearing, roughly-hewn with sticks and skins. Just beyond it is the slope of the riverbank. Its roof is barely higher than a man is tall, and covered in ferns and flowers. Its doorway is covered with the glossy red hide of an elk, back barely striped in brown. 

There are men and women here. Their hair is long - some braided, some full of blooms - and their clothes are odd, fur and hide and stolen linens.

Those who live here are ungodly beautiful. She wonders if it is this strange and apple-treed headland that those who told stories of Tír na nÓg stumbled upon. She wishes Maz were here, so that she could ask her. She feels a sudden stab of pain at thoughts of home, of Phasma and Finn and Rose, of the Northmen and the silver.

“Come, Rey,” Leia insists.

A pack of children emerge from the brush and dart across the path Rey follows, squealing with laughter. They’re beautiful, too, eyes bright and hair threaded with twigs and blooms, throats and wrists adorned with stringed shells and stones and seaglass, childlike in their simplicity.

“ _ Piw petra es,  _ Leia?” a male voice calls from above.

There is a man in an overhanging bough, a child in his arms. He’s impossibly tall, like Kylo, and just as striking. He stares her down unashamedly, hair red as hell, the child his very image. Rey feels her cheeks burning as she stops by Leia.

“A friend, Damaz,” Leia calls to him. “Be good to her.”

He looks at Rey, gaze heavy. “A  _ reunig _ ?”

“A friend,” Leia repeats. They walk on.

The others notice them, one by one, and one by one they stand and nudge one another and watch.

“They want to know who you are,” she hears Leia say. “Don’t be afraid of them.”

“I’m not,” Rey lies.

“You are. Don’t be. No one here will hurt you.”

She is courteous, but she’s blunt in her knowing, just like Kylo is. There is a firepit, there, in the midst of the clearing, with people crowded about it. Leia brings her past a child with a stoat on its shoulder, as docile as a cat, and those at the fire finally turn to notice them.

“Oh,  _ there  _ she is.”

“Where did Ben go?”

“Leia, who’s that?”

“ _ Reunig _ ,” Leia tells them. “Rey. She comes from Ériú, in the north. See how white she is.” 

They’re all so tall, too.

At once they all examine her, lifting the sleeves of her bodice to see her skin. Rey hates this, hates being poked and prodded and stared at, but she’s too frightened to protest. 

“She’s so small,” one of the men says. One of the women - tall with brown skin and thick red ringlets - takes hold of Rey’s arm, pulls up her sleeve, and puts her own dark forearm beside it.

“How white she is!” the woman exclaims, and the others lean in to look. She has freckles scattered dense on her face. “How far north is Ériú?”

Rey realises that the girl is speaking to her and not Leia. She tries as best she can to answer: “Far north, where it’s cold.”

Leia puts an arm around Rey’s shoulders. “Be soft, Enfys, she’s frightened - don’t grab at her.”

Enfys lets go. “She’s small, too,” she says, but not unkindly.

“ _ All  _ selkies are small,” one of the men says. He is slighter than most of the other men, face thinner and build leaner, but he has large soft eyes and dark hair pulled back from his face. When he reaches for her string of seaglass, Rey seems a mare in frozen mid-gallop in sharp, fluid lines inked upon his forearm. She slaps his hand away hard without meaning to.

They all burst into laughter. Leia gives the man a shove in the chest. “Don’t, you horrid thing!” They all laugh even so, not horribly.

“She  _ is  _ small!”

“Cassian!”

Rey is not short for a woman. At home she was as tall as some men. She has no such luxury here. They are all so tall, even the women, and so strong, broad in the back and the belly. Their clothes are rough cloth cut so fine it seems noble, and garments clearly stolen from Men. Some wear thick pelts around their shoulders. Some of the men go barechested. All wear beautiful things at their wrists or ankles or necks - seaglass, riverstones, quartz, teeth and claws carved pretty - and some have things inked under their skin in faded black. There is Cassian’s mare, and a salmon leaps in grey on Enfys’ brown forearm.

The man puts a hand on his chest, and smiles. “Cassian,” he says, and puts his arm around a woman beside him. “ _ An dra-man  _ Jyn.” Jyn is rangy with green eyes and a pleasant face, and she smiles at Rey, too.

“Why did you bring her here?” Jyn asks Leia.

“She’s our friend,” Leia repeats. “You must be kind to her.”

They seem to know better, Rey thinks, than to question Leia, and of them shoot Rey strange looks, but they are gentle to her all the same. A shorter, glossy-haired girl introduces herself as Jessika, and Jyn introduces her to a quiet, older man with a kind face named Galen, her father.

Rey digs in the sacks and satchels. The other women crouch with her, watching. When Rey produces plain-glass beads and plain shifts and wooden hair-combs - things that Kylo has stolen that she will never use - they investigate carefully.

“These are all for you,” she tells them, though she wonders if the dresses are too small, and the beads too fragile. 

“She brought us gifts!”

“Put on a dress, Cassian, go on.”

“Piss off, I’ll never get out of the thing.”

“Where did you get these?” Enfys asks her. “These are Man things.”

“She was reared with Men,” Leia tells them, before Rey can speak. Enfys goes still with the too-small shift halfway over her head, and Jyn’s hands drop, the beads trailing on the ground. 

“How?” Cassian asks.

“Her mother left her with Men when she was a babe. She had to or the _reungwir_ would have killed her.”

Rey lifts her head to look at Leia. “Is that true?” she dares ask. “Do you know that?”

They are interrupted by the return of those that she presumed were absent before her return; tall women and men, beautiful and strong. They crowd around at this new thing to look at, this selkie come inland. Enfys tells them, “See the things the  _ reunig  _ brought us!”

“Don’t crowd her, now,” Leia tells them. A woman with ashy hair in two knots atop her head steps back and watches Rey. after a moment, she tells Leia, “We saw Men earlier, on the long path.”

“Then don’t go near them. Mark me, Kaydel - leave them be.”

She huffs. She has a white fur slung about her shoulder and a string of white shells tied around each ankle. “If they come near here they won’t be left.”

“We’ll see.”

Jessika pushes past Cassian, steps over Rey’s pack, puts her arms around Kaydel’s neck, and kisses her fiercely on the mouth.

Rey watches and is astounded. She knows that, at home - and presumably here - that there are men who love one another secretly, but has never wondered or known of women the same. Kaydel opens her eyes, sees her looking, and asks, “What’s the matter with you,  _ reunig _ ? Haven’t you ever kissed one of your rock-sisters when your  _ reungwir  _ stinks too much?”

The others chuckle, but Rey goes pink. “Let her alone,” someone says, coming up behind them. A man comes to stand by Leia, hair thick and almost-red, smile pleasant. He is handsome, like the Men girls swooned over at home, and with a jolt Rey comes to the realisation of who he is.

“What’d you find, Leia?”

“A selkie,” she says. “She’s a friend. The rest of you, give the girl room to  _ breathe,  _ by hell.”

“Is she staying?” Jyn asks, head back so that Cassian can slide a wooden comb into her hair.

Leia doesn’t answer.  _ They don’t know about Kylo,  _ Rey realised. She meets Leia’s eye. Cassian pats Rey and follows the rest to the riverbank where they sit in the sun. Some go into the water. The foals join them. 

“Han is Kylo’s father,” Leia tells Rey, and her voice is low and tight. Han starts.

“Her?” he asks. He goes pale. Rey feels exposed again, unsafe. “ _ Reuna _ ?”

“Stop it,” Leia hisses.

Han says, “You’re the girl that Leia saw.

“You’re Kylo’s father,” Rey dares. “He didn’t tell me about you.”

“No,” Han agrees. “I didn’t think he would.”

“Why?” Rey asks.

“We disagreed, when he was young. It’s complicated.”

Leia’s face has soured. She interrupts, “Tell her why.”

“There’s no need-”

“Tell her.”

“It doesn’t matter - I - hell, this all must be too much for the girl-”

“For all of us.”

“Where - is he  _ here?”  _ Han whips his head around the clearing, searching. 

“He’s with Ben.”

Leia calls Enfys to take Rey to the edge of the river, and she does. She leads her by a large hand down the bank to where the others lie and float, and oddly, it feels homely. It’s cooler where the air comes off the river. Cassian lies on his back and Jyn sits by him, and Jessika and Kaydel are entwined loosely in the water. Enfys brings Rey an apple.

It is the biggest apple she has ever seen; the size of her fist and as red as bedamned, as red as blood and meat and dark seaweed.

“Can I braid your hair?” Enfys asks, already reaching for it. “I won’t tug on it.”

“Yes.”

She bites into the apple, and the sweetness floods her waiting tongue. Enfys sits close behind her, legs at either side of Rey’s hips, and tugs gently.

Another man hulks out of the water with a splash, making Rey jump. He wipes the water from his eyes and focuses on her, frowning. His wet hair is so long it sticks to his waist.

“That’s Jinn,” Enfys says. “Jinn, this is Rey. She’s from Ériú.”

He doesn’t seem especially pressed. “ _ Reunig? _ ” he asks, after a sniff of the air. “Long way inland.”

Kylo had told her of the distinct differences in the rearing of those at the river and those on the coast. She wonders if the man in the tree and Kaydel are of the coast, wilder and more suspicious, and the rest are river-born, gentle to her for no reason other than it was kind.

She eats her apple, and she waits..

  
  
  


_ Kylo _

  
  


Kylo carries his foal into the woods.

He can scarcely see for the tears clouding his eyes, and when he sets the child down in a mossy green hollow, Ben goes from sobbing to raging. He shrieks and bellows. Kylo kneels before him, grasping at his little wrists as best he can.

“Look at me,” he manages. “Stop - look at me, Ben.”

Ben beats his chest with balled fists. “ _ Where did you go?”  _ he screams. “ _ Why did you disappear? Where were you?  _ **_Where were you_ ** ?”

“I don’t know - I don’t  _ know -  _ Ben, don’t -” His tears flood him as the foal’s do, thickening his throat and wetting his eyes. Ben screeches wordlessly, grief and rage lifting his lungs. He slaps Kylo, claws him, kicks him, pushes away and cries, and goes back to fight him again. Kylo does not stop him, paralysed with stinging, icy guilt.

“She died,” the foal weeps. “She died and I had no  _ mammig  _ or  _ tadig -  _ but you were  _ alive!”  _ He shows his teeth in grief and fury and gives Kylo a shove, sobbing, face red. “And you were - you were -  _ where were you? Where did you go?”  _

The sea thunders against the rocks beyond.

All Kylo can do is hold the child. He holds him even as he fights, crying and wailing and scratching, and squeezes him against his chest until the struggling stops, until Ben weeps limply into his shoulder; great, racking, tired sobs. 

How long they sit there Kylo does not know. They are crying both; hot tears that seem unending, eyes that sting and do not stop. He does not care. He holds his son and will hold him until the earth crumbles around them.

The air is warm. The birds sing. A bee alights on a violet near them. Kylo says in the child’s ear, “I’m here now,  _ ebeul. _ ”

Ben snuffles in response, hiccuping. He seems so delicate when he cries, huge grey eyes wet and shining.

“I’m here now. I love you more than anything, do you hear me? I’m never going away again.”

Ben seizes him suddenly, teary eyes urgent and little hands strong. “ _ Stay, _ ” Ben insisted, through his tears. “You can’t go again. Stay,  _ tadig.  _ You have to stay. Never go again.” He takes firm hold of Kylo’s cheeks and touches his forehead to his father’s, gaze intent. 

“I’m staying,  _ ebeul. _ ” His voice has long since broken with grief and tears, and he makes no bones of it now, holding his child as tightly as he can.

“You have to promise,” Ben cries.

“I promise. Always.”

“ _ Always _ , always,” the foal insists.

“ _ Always _ , always,” Kylo tells him, and kisses his forehead and his nose and squeezes him enough to compensate for the long years of deathly absence.

He lies his head against his father’s chest and goes still there. Kylo kisses the child’s mess of black hair and rocks him, like he did before Ben learned to gallop in his foal’s skin, when he was a babe unwalking. 

“Who is she?” Ben mumbles, nuzzling.

“Sleep,  _ ebeul. _ ”

“ _ Tadig,”  _ Ben whimpers, “who is she,  _ tadig _ ?”

Kylo recalls briefly the strength in Ben’s bones when he rose up to scratch Rey, baring his teeth as if he meant to bite her. “Sleep, sweetheart. I’ll tell you when you wake up.”

His mother would say that, too, when Kylo was a foal.  _ I’ll tell you when you wake up.  _ And she would, though as a child Kylo found that what he thought of as pressing and urgent did not seem so after he had slept. 

He kisses the child’s hair once more. His chest feels flooded with sweetness. It is a relief he dares allow himself to feel, and rests.

  
  
  


_ Rey _

Kylo comes back to her when the sun is halfway across the sky. She smells him before she sees him, and when she turns he is carrying his son, still clinging snug to his father. The birds in the trees twitter and sing on, but the rooks roosting in the low bows croak at them and hop from branch to branch as if welcoming an old friend.

The rest go utterly still. Some do not know him, Rey knows, some knew him as a foal. Leia stands up. 

“Fuck,” she hears the redheaded man whisper.

“Who is that?” someone else murmurs.

Rey is sitting with Leia when she sees him. Leia is on her feet 

Someone pushes past her; Han.

He comes to stand in front of Kylo. He’s tall, too, but nothing compared to his son’s bulk. Kylo’s face does not change, but his brow twitches, and a muscle pulses in his cheek.

Han is tearful, trembling. He lifts a hand to touch Kylo’s cheek, and is permitted, but when he makes to take his hand, Kylo slaps it sharply away.

Leia is between them in an instant, like a horsemaster between two stallions. “Peace,” she says firmly.

“Yes,” Han says shakily, “peace.”

Kylo does not respond.

Some of the others do not know him. Those that did grab him and crush him in their embrace. The big redheaded man sobs, squeezing Kylo, and puts a hand on Rey’s shoulder afterwards; an apology for his former apprehension. The riverborns that didn’t know him embrace him, too, and smile and kiss his cheeks and welcome him. It’s strange to see Kylo taking pleasure in interactions with anyone but her - for so long all she saw was his bitterness towards Men.

Ben goes to Leia’s arms, then, and Kylo comes to Rey.

She is hefted up against him. He kisses her deeply. “Are you alright?” he asks against her lips. 

“I’m fine. Are you - and Ben?”

He exhales slowly. “Give me time,  _ carwen.” _

She sees little of him for the next three days. He is with his son, letting the child screech out his old rage and sadness, and comes to her at night when he can. Rey finds the other women pleasant to be around - Enfys, Jyn, Jessika, Kaydel, the rest - and can listen to their chatter for hours, lying on the riverbank or swimming in the water. 

It is beautiful here. Even when the sun does not shine, the wind brings the rain down heavy, and the air is filled with good fresh smells. The thunder is a comfort, though at home it frightened her, alone in her stone hut. When the sun is not shielded by clouds it beats down upon them, river glittering and light dappling buttery throughout the long green forest, air thick with heat. Damselflies flit from reed to reed, and within the deeper forest the birds call throughout its length, echoing from tree to tree. 

They are a strange people, but it is so different here. Children are not burdens, not pains-in-the-neck to be reared until they are of value. Foals are loved so deeply, and it shows in their faces - so content, so gentle. They play with their parents and scrap with one another, squealing with laughter and rolling in the grass, their pet beasts following excitedly, wolves and magpies and foxes with plush tails.

Couples are different, too. There is no such thing here as an arranged union, a marriage of worth or of value higher to one party or the other. They love one another so deeply, and Rey sees Kylo in the men - playful with their mates, ever-eager, ever-gentle. She sees Cassian bringing Jyn blooms three times a day, and sees Damaz being attentive to the pregnant Ilsa, making her laugh with his jibes.

Leia stays close to her, and often says, “It won’t be long now,” gently to her. Rey knows she means Kylo. She still loathes this wait. 

The child hates her. He shows her his pearly teeth if she comes near, and will not hesitate to let loose a great snarl if she comes closer than he likes. He stays buried against Kylo as much as he can, clinging to him, and Kylo allows it. The wolves follow him wherever he goes.

She understands. She lost a parent once, too

Kylo is tired, she can tell. The boy’s rages make him weary, and he tries to bridge the gap between the pair, but Ben is still adjusting, still learning to have his father about him again.

Kylo comes to her, on the third day, when she sits with Enfys and Jyn on the riverbank. They have prettied her hair; braided it wet down the back the night before and loosening it now so that it is curly and threading through it a crown of blackthorn and dogwood blooms. They both wear a string of beads that Rey brought, and Jyn wears one of her dresses, delighted in its newness.

He comes up beside her and kisses her cheek. “Your hair,” he murmurs.

“We did it for her,” Jyn says. “Doesn’t she look nice?”

“Very,” Kylo says. “Rey, come with me.”

“Where?”

He brings her back up the riverbank. He still wears his silver torc, but even these bare days have made him seem wilder, more at home. Rey squeezes his hand.

“When will it be - when will it be all alright?” she asks him.

“Soon. Soon, I promise. I know it feels all wrong, but it won’t be long, I swear.”

Ben is sitting in a pile of wolves at the edge of the clearing, the wildflowers of the woods thick here. Rey follows Kylo through them, chest tightening. 

“Kylo, I don’t know if-”

He hushes her. The child is making a tiny cone of sticks beside him, trying and failing to bring the little structure together with twine. He lifts his head when they approach, eyes hateful and mouth upturned in a scowl. Rey swallows deeply.

Kylo bends and kisses the top of the boy’s head. Ben never takes his eyes off Rey. “What are you making,  _ ebeul?”  _ he asks the child, sitting by him, and Rey sits as far from Ben as she can. The grey she-wolf flops herself into Kylo’s lap and stares at Rey from it, yellow eyes boring a hole in her face.

“I don’t want her there,” the child gripes.

“Ben.”

“I don’t like her there.”

“ _ Ebeul…” _

Ben says, plainly, “She smells.”

“ _Ebeul,_ don’t be rude,” Kylo gripes, stricter now that the tears have dried. Rey can see plainly that Ben cares little for the discipline. 

“She _does_ smell, _tadig._ She smells different.”

“She _is_ different.”

Ben puts his arm around the neck of a white wolf and stares at Rey pointedly. The wolf leans her head on him.

“Seal,” he decides, eventually. It is the first time he has ever spoken to her directly, and her heart pounds pathetically because of it.

“Yes,” Rey agrees.

“ _Reun-gwerin_ don’t like us.”

“But _I_ like you,” Rey appeals to him. The grey wolf sniffs her foot, grizzling, and lies down beside her. Its pups climb all over it. “I like you all, ever so much.”

Ben wrinkles his little nose. 

His father tells him, “She came all the way inland,  _ ebeul.  _ That’s a long way for a seal to walk.”

Ben sniffs, “I don’t care.”

Kylo grizzles softly. He warns, sharper, “ _ Ben… _ ”

Ben’s mouth twists into a pout. He stares at Kylo, and Kylo stares back, unyielding. Rey wonders if the tantrums of these children are wilder and more destructive than those of human children, and whether Ben is about to have one. 

He turns his face away instead, hiding it in the wolf’s white neck. “Don’t care,” he mumbles. “Don’t care how far she came. Don’t like her.”

Rey’s face burns. She stays there even so. The pups are playing, yipping and barking, rolling over one another in the soft grass. Kylo gives Rey a sorrowful look. One of the pups dares to come near her, loping over to her leg and climbing onto it. 

Ben barks at it to get down, and it goes back to him. He is still trying and failing to make the sticks stand up. He has not lashed it around the joint, and every time he makes to wind the twine about its tip, the structure falls apart.

_ Say something. Help him. _

“Maybe,” Rey says, and Ben goes tight at the mere sound of her voice, “maybe if you lashed it from the top it might stay up.” Something changes in the air, something unpleasant.

His head shoots up, and feels his glare burning into her face like a cattle-iron. Ben leans forward and says, with plaintive hatred, baring his teeth, “You - are - not -  _ my - mother _ .”

He goes back to his futile game. Rey sits there, stung, cheeks burning and eyes stinging. Kylo says, a little sharper, “Ben!- _petra eo doujan ket -_ ”

The child hunches into himself, trembling with fury. He is not afraid of Kylo. 

Kylo speaks lowly to him, reprimanding, and as he does the pup comes back to Rey, too curious to disobey its master. It climbs back into her lap and puts its front paws on her belly, whining. It is a beautiful thing, grey-red-brown with wet grey eyes and a snuffling nose. Rey dares to stroke under its chin and it licks her furiously, tail wagging so violently it shakes the pup from left to right.

“ ....I  _ know  _ you’re frightened, but you can’t say those things to her,” Kylo is telling Ben lowly. “She isn’t trying to harm you. She just wants to be your friend. Listen to me, Ben.”

“No!”

For a moment, Rey thinks Ben to be arguing with his father, and tries to ignore the raised voices. 

“Ben, stay there-”

“No, she’s -  _ no!” _

Rey realises, with her hand on the pup’s head, that Ben is bellowing at her.

“No!” he protests. “She’s mine! Don’t  _ touch  _ her!” 

He scrambles up, lunges at Rey, and cracks her so sharply across the face that she goes flying backwards before Kylo can stop her.

Rey can’t believe the force that the boy applies to her. Had she been human, it would have killed her; broken her jaw so that she choked on her tongue, or cracked her skull. The ground comes up to strike her as she falls, and the wolf pup scrambles to its mother. Warm pink pain blooms sharply in her cheek.

Kylo sweeps the raging child into his arms in a shift that is half fierce discipline and half deep comfort. Ben _fights_ him, bellowing and screeching and trying his utmost to beat Kylo’s chest with determined fists. Rey has never seen anything like it in all her life. She has seen children scrap and struggle and screech and cry, but she has never seen a child fight so viciously. Kylo does not scold Ben, but simply clutches him tight to his chest to quiet him until he stops. 

By the end, the child is sobbing again, hiding his face, and Rey has never felt such guilt. 

Kylo comes to hold her when Ben is quieted, sniffling amongst the wolves with Leia, who came to examine Rey’s face first. Rey sits in Kylo’s lap and sniffles her own guilty tears, and Kylo kisses and kisses and kisses her slapped red cheek.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles. “He doesn’t mean it. He’s scared and stubborn, he doesn’t mean it.” 

“It’s fine,” Rey insists, teary, when he goes to touch her slapped cheek. It is fading already, the sharp redness, but stings still. The boy is strong. “It’s fine, honestly.” She pauses for a moment and bursts into tears. “Does he hate me?”

“No! Stop it. Don’t say that.”

“He does, he  _ hates  _ me.”

Rey wants to go home all of a sudden. Leia is walking with Ben now, towards the thickening woods. Kylo catches Rey’s face in his hand.

“Lie here with me. No, come here.”

She gives in, and they lie side by side, staring up at the green canopy.

“He doesn’t mean a word of it,” Kylo says, calmer now. “He’s just - it’s hard.”

Rey turns her head to look at him. He seems to struggle with the words. “He was alone for so long. Not  _ alone,  _ but - he had no mother and no father. He put his  _ mammig  _ in the ground, he  _ saw  _ what happened - and then he isn’t alone, and I’m here, but I’m here with you. He wants me back to himself the way it used to be. He wants it as much the same as it was before Mina - before she died. And he knows what you are, and he knows how his mother felt about your kind, and he’s frightened and it’s too much and the only way he knows to deal with your kind is to snap and bite. I  _ know  _ you’ve not hurt him, but - he’s just a baby. That’s how foals think. He’s still so little.”

Rey understands. It’s too much for the child, and she is stealing away his once-dead father. She sniffles against Kylo’s chest. “When - when will it stop?”

“Soon. Soon, Rey, I swear.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.”

  
  


\-----------------

When they wake, Ben is nowhere to be seen. Rey realises with a shock that they have been asleep for hours, and Ben has been gone all night. The sun’s glare is softened by brewing clouds - “that’s how it usually is here,” Kylo murmurs in her ear, sleepy - and there’s a threat of rain on the cooler air. Some of the others are still asleep. Rey can hear early-rising foals playing quietly in the shallows of the river beyond. She sits up and yawns, lies down again, and looks up into the canopy.

Blackbird is sitting on the bough of a tree above her. When Rey starts in shock, the raven croaks and flits down, landing on Kylo’s bare back.

Face on his arm, Kylo grunts, “What the fuck just landed on me-”

“It’s Blackbird!”

“Get her off.”

“Don’t be foul. You came back,” she murmurs to the bird, who bites her in response. One of the foals nearby - a fair-haired girl - is awake and watching her. She has blue seaglass around her neck and a wilted daisy behind her ear. 

“Is she yours?” the child asks.

“Yes,” Rey says. “You can touch her if you like.”

The girl comes tentatively, taking careful steps, and squats beside Rey. The bird turns on Kylo’s bare back and stares at the child with a beady eye. 

“You can look after her, if you like,” Rey tells the girl. “She can be your raven.”

“ _ Oh,” _ the girl breathes, enraptured.

“Her name’s Blackbird.”

“Can I really have her?”

“Of course you can. She might fly away sometimes, but she’ll always come back. She came with me from Ériú.”

The child strokes Blackbird’s dark head with a careful finger, and the bird nips genially at her fingertip. 

“She’s going to poo on Kylo!” the child exclaims, when the raven starts to lift its tail, and Kylo is upright in an instant, sending Blackbird flapping onto the child’s shoulder instead. 

“Kylo, she almost pood on you.”

“And I would have roasted her.” The child giggles at that. “Have you seen Ben, Maiwenn?”

“He went off with the wolf. I don’t know where he was going. Can I  _ really  _ keep her?”

The child is assured that the raven is hers, and goes back to wake her mother to show her the gift she was given. Rey looks at the trees beyond, chewing her lip.  _ Where did he go? Is it because of me?  _ She looks down at Kylo, unreasonably calm despite the absence of his once-lost son.

“Kylo, where do you think he is?”

“Ben?” He doesn’t seem to know.

“He could be lost,” she tries to reason, and is stunned when Kylo laughs. “Don’t  _ laugh. _ ”

“You’re not in your bay anymore,  _ dousa, _ ” he tells her, and grumbles when she doesn’t come down to kiss him. “It’s different here. You know it’s different. They don’t need to be watched over every second. They aren’t like Men.”

He’s told her this before, that foals are hardy. Most are sweet like Maiwenn, but could be as wild as Ben if frightened. 

“Come with me to the beach,” he says. “There’s one not too far, come with me and we’ll swim. Are you hungry? You don’t need to worry anymore.”

She  _ is  _ hungry, and the food in her pack is running low. The food they eat here is sparse, because they have no need of great meals every day. Rey has been wary of any of them being properly hungry in the way that Kylo once was, but Leia assured her that she will see, and know. Those in their hungers give the others space and go elsewhere to hunt.

She wonders where Ben has gone with his pack, and worries. It is ingrained in her. The village at home has lost children before, to wolves and brigands and the cold, and she cannot help but fear for her.

Before it is time to go, Rey digs in her pack for her seeds. She had mentioned offhandedly to the other women, when they asked about the intimacy between Rey and Kylo and how it came to be, that they had not yet known one another in Gaul because of Rey’s inability to heat water without a pot. They had laughed at her, but not horribly.

“ _ I  _ chew them,” Jyn had said. “That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Kylo shifts onto four hooves to carry her, giving her his clothes before he does so that they do not rip into a thousand shreds. She balls them up and sits upon his warm wide back and, whickering, he takes them both deep into the green wood.

It is more than exhilarating to be upon his back when he breaks into an unrestrained gallop, back hooves launching them over fallen trees and great rocks and solitary streams. She can feel his muscles shift and bunch beneath her. When he slows, Rey allows herself to sit up straight and let her hands brush the leaves of a great alder, eight feet off the ground. She is so high up that often she must lay herself flat to his back so as not to knock her head on the branches above. 

Kylo slows when they smell salt on the forest air. Rey can hear the sea even behind the trees, hear the shrieking of gulls in the sky, as if welcoming them both back to the edge of the world.

This is a different beach to the one they arrived on, smaller and quieter, the tide gentle on the shortened shore. Kylo drops, legs beneath his body, and lets her climb off before pushing back into his skin. It doesn’t startle her now, though she remembers - it feels so long ago - when he first changed before her eyes, and how horrified she was.

She goes to take off her shift as though she means to swim,

It feels like she has forgotten how to mate, almost. It’s urgent for them both - she realises how much she has missed the touch of him when he puts his weight on her, hands bunched in the skirt of her shift. “I love you,” he grunts, nipping at her lip.

Kylo is so soft to her when he knows she needs it. He bites - he always bites - but it is so gentle now, a bare scrape of sharp teeth. Sometimes she will nip at him, moreso since she found her skin, but often when she is in such moods she will be bitten and she will adore it. 

They mate, they make love, and it is brief. Kylo promises longer when things have settled, and she believes him, chewing on the seeds with his seed inside her. He brings her to lie by him, panting both, and pats her behind. She extends a leg over him, comfortable in the soft sand.

“It’ll be bright soon,” he says, “much brighter than Ériú. You’ll get all brown.” He kisses her shoulder and smiles, eyes half-lidded in his contentment. 

“So will you.”

“Maybe. Not as much as you will. I got so white up north.” He holds up his pale forearm and Rey traces the faint blue veins under the bulging muscle there. Rey rubs her cheek against his chest, and when she closes her eyes, he kisses her forehead and strokes her hair, other arm snug about her waist.

“It feels strange,” she murmurs.

“Hm?”

“Just … being here. I love it, it’s just-”

“Ben?”

“Mm. I feel like it’ll be perfect once he - once he understands.”

“He will.”

“I hope so.”

She sits up a little and looks at him, stomach to the sand. He is so big. She will never truly be quieted by how enormous Kylo is, how wide his shoulders and chest and belly are, the breadth of his thighs, the size of his hands and feet. 

“Are you hungry?” he puts to her.

“Yes.”

He goes to find food for her, absolutely refusing to allow her to rise and join him - “you stay, stay and rest.” - and stalks down the sand. Rey admires his wide white back, his backside, his long thighs and his broad calves. He disappears into the blue water. She balls her shift into a wad and rests her head on it. The sun is a constant immovable heat on her bare body. Once, she might have fled it, sought shade under a tree, but now she wants her skin to soak it up entirely, to become it.

She remembers seeing seals on the coast at home, lying in the sun in abject pleasure.

It is the third day of the year she will spend in Gaul, and though her gut twists a little at the thought of the hateful child, and how he will love her, she is content, and warm. When she goes home, in a year’s time, the summer will be lessening and pushing into the cool of autumn.

Eyes closed, Rey hears the scrape of miniscule scree on its mother rock. Her eyes snap open. Another scrape. She gives a jolt, ice spreading in her chest, and pulls herself up, whipping around.

Ben is crouching on the rocks behind her, glaring, forest-flushed.

The gulls screech, as if they are laughing.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations, Breton/Gaulish (most of these you'll know by now)
> 
> **Carwen** \- darling
> 
> **Ebeul** \- foal, kid
> 
> **Mammig** \- mother, mama
> 
> **Mamm-gozh** \- grandmother
> 
> **Tadig** \- father, papa
> 
> **Kas eñ, hag kousk mat. Me diwall Rey.** \- Take him and rest - I'll look after Rey.
> 
> **Reunig** \- selkie
> 
> **Piw petra es?** \- Who is that?
> 
> **an dra-man Jyn** \- This is Jyn.
> 
> **Reungwir** \- male selkie (literally seal-man)
> 
> **Reun-gwerin** \- selkies, plural (literally seal-people)
> 
> **Petra ou doujan ket** \- don't be foul
> 
> Tír na nÓg (Irish: Land of Youth/of the Young) is a name for the Otherworld in Irish mythology and maybe be a general region of the Otherworld in Celtic Mythology as a whole. From Wikipedia: Other Old Irish names for the Otherworld include _Tír Tairngire_ (Land of Promise/Promised Land) _Tír fo Thuinn_ (Land under the Wave), _Mag Mell_ (Plain of Delight/Delightful Plain), _Ildathach_ (Multicoloured Place), and _Emain Ablach_ (the Isle of Apple Trees).
> 
> The apple tree one is pretty important. Rey wonders if Land's End is what people stumbled upon when they say they've been to Tír na nÓg. In the OG story, Oisín (hot shit Fíanna warrior) sees a hot shit blonde lady, Niamh Chinn Ór (Niamh of the Golden Hair/Head) and goes on her white horse (magical hot shit horse - coincidence???) across the sea to Tír na nÓg where he has an absolute belter and the time of his life. Everyone's fine as fuck, the food is cracker, it never rains etc etc. Then he gets homesick. 
> 
> Niamh tells him he can go home, but not to get off the magic hot shit horse, or he'll die. He rides the horse to get back, and finds that while he was only in Tír na nÓg for a week or so, that 300 years have passed in Ireland and everyone he knows and loves is dead. He comes across a few lads trying to shift a rock, tries to help from his saddle, falls, and does the rapid-aging thing from Back to the Future, and dies. 
> 
> Did Oisín end up in Land's End with a bunch of 7 foot tall kelpies? Who knows. Sure would be a cracker addition to the myths though.


	3. With All You Ever Knew

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Foreword and links, because I am unable to embed.
> 
> SITB: Land's End Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37W80zQvr7yNmYhv0fFuVb?si=FB1teRfwSEuabdlTxeTeSQ
> 
> **Ch. 3 Themes**
> 
> Dh'eirich Mi Moch | Julie Fowlis. Link - https://open.spotify.com/track/72DjMmfQ4O0aK4AdS97WBz?si=H_lzqqN3SZmF0IE60EoTQg (ao3 won't let me gift chapters, but big ups to Tig for making her class fucking cry with this banging track)
> 
> Hunt the Hare | Lisa Knapp. Link - https://open.spotify.com/track/6kcs4TeTxbBrW5SWMItNnK?si=GBxJdxULTQ6txFeoe-s6zw
> 
> Some of you may know that some rhino's dick of a woman reported me for saying a naughty word on my @hagenshxll on Twitter, and got me suspended. Be assured that they are probably furiously masturbating over that fact rn. Bork bork. My new acc is @hagenshall (with an a, not an x) on Twitter and on Tumblr. Please do feel free to follow/DM me on either!
> 
> also, I WILL be updating my neglected WIPs, I swear, and also starting a few new ones. I'm also in the process of designing an indie game right now, which is essentially just Salt in the Blood but extra spoopy.
> 
> I

_Ben_

He was brought far from what he had done, swept up into his grandmother’s arms and carried while he wept in rage. Over her shoulder, he saw Rey’s cheek as scarlet as poppies, starting up in tears, his father cradling her. Leia took him away. He simply cried.

“That was a foul thing to do, _ebeul._ She was trying to be good to you.”

Ben could only snuffle, clinging to his grandmother’s neck like a starfish. She cradled him, rocking very gently, and murmured, “She’s just as frightened as you are.”

He made an upset, indignant sound. _Why_ was she frightened? She had no reason to be frightened. No one was being rough to her. They had fawned over her. Only Damaz had given her a filthy look, and he was only one.

_His_ father, _his_ father. _His._ He wanted his _tadig,_ and he didn’t want some selkie-come-inland along with him.

Leia stepped over a brook with him in her arms. The wolves followed, snouts raised and tails low in concern.

“You remember when your _tadig_ was gone, don’t you? And you remember how horrid it was to be without him? Look at me, _ebeul._ ”

Ben refused, pressing his face flat against the white fox of her _foulinenn._

“He was swept away by the sea, and he remembered nothing. She found him, _ebeul,_ and she helped him remember. She was his frienf fist. She wants you to be a friend her, too, don’t you understand? She only wants to be good to you.”

“Hate her,” Ben mumbled into the pelt.

“Don’t say those things, Ben.”

He whipped his head up and exclaimed, “I _do_ hate her, I _do,_ I _do_ !” Leia caught his wrists swiftly before he could begin to flail. His cheeks started to burn and redden, and he could feel the too-familiar-of-late fury rush up into his chest. “I _do_ hate her, I _hate_ seals and I - I - I hate _y-_ ”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Leia warned him. Ben’s chest rose and fell like a frightened robin’s. “I won’t make you love her. Your father won’t make you. Even she won’t make you. No one will force you. But being cruel to her is wrong. Ignore her, pretend she isn’t there, do as you wish - but you can’t be cruel to her, Ben. You can’t.”

The corners of Ben’s mouth began to turn dangerously southwards. “My _mammig_ hated seals,” he dared, angry voice trembling, close to a crack.

Leia went still. She looked down at him, and her stern eyes seemed to shine. She swallowed. “Your _mammig_ loved you more than anything in the world. But sometimes, _ebeul,_ she was hateful.” The breeze brought her hair down around them both in strands, like it was a ribcage and Ben was a heart.

She had been. His mother had never been interested in the company of the others, isolating herself with wolves and crows, but never to punish herself. It was the way she liked it - alone with her single foal, away from seals and horses both.

“Seals are fools. We know that, don’t we? Seals are fools, but Rey isn’t the same as them.”

“ _Tadig_ said her _mammig_ was of Men,” Ben told her, shaky.

“Do you see her chasing you with a spear, calling you foul and wrong? Does she push us out of the meander so she can live there herself?”

Ben didn’t answer.

“You know she doesn’t,” she went on. He didn’t respond. “Do you see?” Leia asked. “It will hurt your _tadig_ ’s heart to have you both upset and hating one another.”

He snuffled into her _foulinenn_ and mumbles, “Don’t know.”

“ _Ebeul,_ ” she sighed. “You don’t have to fawn her like a pup. You don’t have to love her. Just be good to her. Are you sorry?”

“ _No._ ” He was lying.

He hadn’t meant to _hurt_ her. He wanted to be left alone to play, and then she was _there_ and _talking._ The rage had funnelled down his arms and legs, and before he knew it he had slapped her in the head so fiercly that she fell. _Tadig_ swept him up and reprimanded him fiercely. Ben saw Rey cry.

His hand still stings. He is sorry.

Leia makes him look at her. He stares defiantly back, eyes wet, and she glowers.

“You _are_ sorry, soft thing. You should tell her you’re sorry.”

“She won’t be happy with me, because I smacked her.”

“She’s kind, _ebeul._ ”

“Mm.”

Leia lets him alone with his wolves. Ben goes looking.

His beautiful grey girl - paws tipped white, eyes great and dark - follows him. He goes on deep into the green, following the river to where it will end at the sea.

“We’re going to see her, _mammig,_ ” he says to the forest. Leia has told him before than she has caught brief glimpses of his mother in the world after this one. Happy, always, with her beasts, in the long night-bay.

He wonders what she would think, if she were here. Gone are the days of desperate tears, the nights of black-dreams, of screaming for her to come back. He is older now, and knowing.

Mina would admit her wrongs, though she’d spit them up like bile and make the extraction of an apology so difficult for its seeker that often they would give up. She would not veil her feelings in false friendship.She wouldn’t hurt the few she loved over her own misgivings. She was civil to Leia, to Han, for Ben’s sake.

Mina would tell him to be good, and to be brave, be a good brave foal, be a strong boy.

He will.

The _reuna_ is lying by herself at the rocky end of the narrow strand, hair wet all down her white back.

\---------------------------------------------------------------

_Rey_

He crouches there, shifting on his haunches, gaze unmoving. Behind him, the great grey wolf lingers by the rocks, snuffling at the sand blown there.

“Oh.” Rey instinctively covers herself, snatching Kylo’s white shirt and shrouding herself in it - he’s so big that it covers her like a short shift - and shrinks back. “Oh I - I didn’t see you -”

“Where’s my _tadig_?” Ben asks. His cheeks are pink with exertion. She wonders how far he had to walk to find her.

“He’s in the water.”

Ben watches her with those queer grey eyes. What malice lingered there before has all but seeped away, and in its place remains a strange sort of curiosity; sad, but willing. He is, in most ways, his father’s very image, but Ben is prettier, features more delicate than Kylo’s. Rey can only assume that he takes after his mother, too - the grey eyes must be hers, searching and deep.

Rey knows not what he means to do. It’s ridiculous to be this wary of a child, but she has learned it. Does he mean to slap her again? Did he come here to show her the full capabilities of the aggression he showed on the other side of the headland, unrestrained?

They look at one another in silence for a moment. Ben shifts where he crouches, little hands clasped about his ankles. He lifts one of these hands very slowly, reaches for her, and she pulls her head away lest he strike her again. There is a string of seashells about his wrist.

He stills, hurt. “Didn’t mean to,” he mumbles. Rey dares not move. His fingers brush her cheek.

“ _Kaout keuz._ Didn’t mean to smack you.” His lower lip trembles as if he means to cry. _Oh, fuck, don’t cry, whatever you do._ If she sees the boy cry she will surely blubber in sympathy.

“Oh - oh, it’s fine. It’s alright, don’t cry.”

Ben promptly bursts into tears.

He’s like every other child in that; beautiful as he may be, he still looks like a little goblin when he cries, face beet-red and snotty, mouth open wide like a tree hollow, and though Rey is swallowing tears herself she wonders if she could laugh.

“Not f-fine,” he wails, hiccuping the way children do. “Didn’t m-mean t-o. _Mamm-g-gozh_ said I h-h-had to say so-rry. My _ma-mmig_ w-w-ould tell me I h-had to say so-rry.”

Children have fallen and hopped their knees or grazed their palms in front of her before, and she knew to pick them up and try as sure as bedamned to tell them how brave they were. Acknowledging grazes and scrapes means a child is going to bawl. She has seen little boys break their fingers, and their mothers’ refusal to coddle and wail with them has kept them from going into hysterics.

She can’t do that now. She stares at him, and he just bawls on, hiccuping and shuddering and snotting. The wolf behind him gets up and noses him in concern. He stays her with a hand on her cheek, wailing.

“Ben,” Rey begins, very carefully. “It’s truly alright.”

“ _No,”_ he admonishes her. The beast puts her face beside his with a whine.

“It _is._ It hardly even hurt.”

There is a great commotion in the water beyond. Rey turns, thinking it is Kylo roused from the depths by the sound of his boy’s bawling, but it is simply a wave slopping over a jagged rock at the foot of the headland.

“Ben,” she says. “You don’t need to cry.”

“I-I-I’m so-rry - didn’t me-an t-to sma-ck you.”

She doesn’t know what to do. “I - uh - here, come here,” she says, somewhat determined, and holds out her arms. “Come here, it’s alright.”

He stops his bawling and stares at her. He hiccups. He stares at her outstretched hands. He puts his face in her shoulder and hiccups. She holds him.

“Sshh,” she says awkwardly. “It’s alright.” He’s heavy for a child of his age. Rey thinks to rock him, and stops herself. _He isn’t a baby._

Ben snuffles and clings to her neck. The gulls are calling again, softer, and the waves roll gently. She rocks him anyway.

Ben mumbles, “Where did you come from?”

The nature of the question makes her start. “What?”

“Where are you from?” the child repeats himself.

“Ériú.”

“What’s Ériú?”

Rey points to the north, to the other end of the sharp headland. Ben lifts his head off her to look, as if it will manifest on the sea. “It’s a great big island. It’s that way. Swim and swim, and you’ll find it eventually.”

“Why did you leave it?”

Rey feels her cheeks pinkening. “I came with your father.”

“Why?” Ben persists, a child through and through no matter the blood in his veins.

“Because I love him.”

The boy considered this for a moment.

“Did you look after my _tadig_ when he got lost?” Ben asked eventually. “Did you make him better so he could come home?”

Rey started in surprise. “I - well, I -”

“ _Mamm-gozh_ said that you did,” the boy said.

“Oh.”

“She said you helped him get better so he could remember how to come home.”

“She’s right,” she told Ben. “I helped him to get better, so he could remember.”

He looks at her for a long moment. He turns to the wolf and gives her a gentle push and orders, “ _Annez.”_ When she backs her haunches and refuses, he says it again, sterner, and both Ben and Rey watch her as she lopes into the thick of the trees.

He stays in her lap until Kylo emerges, dripping, hair wet and black and slick on his shoulders. Ben is still pink and damp from tears, and as soon as Kylo sees him sitting on Rey, he rushes up the sand, leaving great deep tracks like a pony. “What is it?” he exclaims, snatching up his britches and almost tearing them to get them on. “Where’s your _mamm-gozh_?”

“No-where,” Ben tells him. “I came on my own.”

Kylo goes down to him, but Ben does not leave Rey’s lap. “Did something happen?”

“No, _tadig.”_

Kylo’s chest deflates in relief. It reminds Rey of boisterous children kicking a pig’s bladder about the field until someone pitches it too hard, and the air _whooosh_ es out. “Don’t scare me like that. Why did you come?”

Ben’s eyes go shiny and Rey thinks he might cry again. She blurts, “He was saying he was sorry for clouting me.”

Kylo looks at the boy. Ben looks back, eyes going wet as he puts his head back against Rey. “Good,” Kylo says, and when Ben puts his head close to him he kisses the boy’s hair. “Good, so you should. And you don’t ever do it again, _ebeul,_ you must promise.”

“‘Promise,” Ben mumbled.

“Good.”

Kylo says nothing about where Ben is sitting, but his eyes pose a question to Rey. She shakes her head. She isn’t sure what she’d even say.

It takes a little while for Ben to be calm enough to stand up and go to Kylo. He clings to him, too. It does not take much for Kylo to jibe him into childish excitability, lying on his back and throwing the child into the air only to catch him again. Rey sits at Kylo’s side

“Come and play, _tadig,_ ” Ben whined, climbing up to tug at Kylo’s hand. “Please!”

“We’ll go and play later, _ebeul._ ”

“Go and play _now,_ ” Ben insists, and Rey realises that he is clinging to her hand, too. He tugs again, eyes flickering between them both.

“I’ll play with you,” Rey blurts out.

Ben goes still and looks her in the eye. “Now,” he repeats, pulling on her hand with an unchildlike strength that could, if exerted, pull her straight into the water with the barest amount of effort.

“Your _tadig_ will come too, won’t he?”

They play. Ben dashes down the sand to reach the water first. As they watch him run, Kylo asks, “What was that all about?”

“He said he was sorry for smacking me, and then just started _bawling_. That was the only way I knew to make him stop crying.”

“He looked … _comfortable._ ”

“ _Tadig!”_ Ben calls from the waterline. “Come on, _tadig!”_

“Come,” Kylo says to Rey, and races her down the sand. When they push into the water, Rey’s skin prickles and crawls, and then she is whole.

Kylo chases the child through the kelp. The sun ripples through the shallow blue, and when Ben squeals he trills, bubbles blowing from his nostrils.

Rey cannot take her eyes away from him. Kylo’s water-skin is scaled and gilled, bronze-eyed and long-clawed, and Ben’s is the same, almost. His eyes, now are wide and silver, the bare scales on his back and chest the softest slate-blue. He darts around them both, still beautiful even like this. He clings to Kylo’s back, and in newfound boldness clings to Rey as she swims, trilling through the water. When Kylo reaches for Rey, great webbed paw curling about her waist, Ben shoots between them determinedly.

Ashore, he continues. He is hyperactive and playful like any child, racing across the sand while Kylo lies in the sun, eyes closed but hearing everything to mind Ben. Rey sits alongside him, sandy down her back. Ben chases errant seagulls, hands flying out to catch them as they screech in rage. He snatches one clean from the air - a young grey one, squawks keener than its white elders - and brings it to Kylo, who sets it free flapping into the sky.

Ben retires to the sand when he tires of his racing, arms full of shells - scallop and mussel and limpet - and thrusts himself between them very purposely. Rey pinches the top of Kylo’s arm when he chuckles. The child lies between them and busies himself with his shells.

Kylo leans over on his side and plucks a strand of seaweed from the child’s wet hair. Ben puts a shell in Kylo’s palm and leaves one on Rey’s knee.

“Are we friends now?” she asks Ben, watching him pile the shells in little towers. He lies on his tummy and sniffs, shrugging. One of the little towers topples when he lies flat, knocking it with an errant elbow. “Is that a yes?”

“Maybe,” the child allows. He pauses. “I’ve never had a _reunig_ for a friend before.”

“I’ve never had a foal for a friend before.”

“No,” Ben agrees. He plays in silence for a moment, though his hands still when he seems deep in thought. Rey leans on Kylo’s exposed chest, and sees that he is smiling with both eyes closed.

“You won’t try and smack me again, will you?” Rey asks, half-jesting. Ben reddens a little. He is ashamed of what he did, quite clearly, and so she decides never to bring it up again.

He shakes his head and mumbles, “No, I promise.”

At intervals he stands up and searches on the sand for other things to enrich his play, often going as far as the waterline, during which Kylo says softly to Rey, “Which way did he come?”

She points to the trees. “Straight in that way. He had one of the wolves with him.”

“He’s growing on you,” Kylo accuses her playfully. Rey rolls her eyes at him. “Don’t be so icy. I thought it’d tale _weeks._ ”

Ben comes back to them, steps careful in the sand. He never looks away from the rocks, little face pinched in concern. Kylo follows his gaze and goes tense.

“What?” she asks them. “What is it?”

Ben goes to where Kylo sits and leans on him, head close. “ _Reunig,”_ he whispers, flat against Kylo’s back, arms around his neck. Ben is tall for a child, but Kylo is so big that Ben can rest quite comfortably against his back while he stands and Kylo sits.

There is a naked woman standing on the outcrop, as still as the rock under her. She stares at them. Rey straightens up. The woman is short, dark hair a long, wet tangle to the middle of her back, and when Rey moves she gives a start.

“She’s looking at us, _tadig._ ”

“Not us.” Kylo’s voice is barely a whisper. “She’s looking at Rey.”

She is. She looks between Rey and Kylo, to Ben, and back to Rey again. It would take Rey thirty swift sprinting paces to reach her.

“Who is she, Kylo?” Rey asks, and does not break gaze with the woman on yonder. A wave crashes over the outcrop and soaks the woman, but she does not move an inch, nor does she look away. Her face is full of fear.

“She’s like you.”

“Like me,” Rey echoes.

She wonders what the woman is thinking. Most likely, she surmises, that Rey is frightened; forced into mating with such a vile, giant beast; forced to birth a feral child; hostage in a dark bay.

Rey wants to go to her, to tell her that it isn’t so, that she has no need to fear them. As soon as Kylo moves, shifting Ben onto his lap, the woman darts back into the water, and it is as if she was never there.

“Don’t worry about it,” Kylo tells her. “We always see them. They watch and they run. It doesn’t change much.” He says _always_ as if he hasn’t been gone for hundreds of years.

Rey sits back on the sand with Ben. The sun beats down upon them now. She will be freckled from head to chest, her shift protecting the rest of her from its rays. Ben doesn’t notice her concern, and plays at her feet, urging two little crabs into a pincing match.

Kylo leans over to Rey. “Hey. Don’t worry your head about her. She was scared of _me,_ not you. Don’t mull it.”

“Mm.” She shifts uncomfortable, and keeps looking back at the rock where the selkie stood.

“We’ll go to the town. Hm?” He kisses her ear and rests his head on her shoulder. “It’s not far, we can walk to it. Tomorrow, or the day after. You can spend that gold.”

She gives him a look and he laughs. “What? I can hardly bring it back, can I?”

“I suppose not.”

“I’ve been to the town. It’s not long to walk.”

Rey pursed her lips a moment. “Mm.”

“Give me a kiss,” Kylo insists, and when she refuses, hiding a smile, he gripes, “ _kiss_ me, you stubborn thing.”

They trail back to the riverlands. Ben shows Rey his foalskin, coyly, s0 sweet it makes her almost cry. Kylo matches him with his great horseskin, and Rey sits upon his great back the whole way home, the black foal trotting along beside them.

Three days pass - Rey spends them trying to know the child, tolerating the overeager wolves and their rank tongues. He is loathe to be alone with her without Kylo at first, wary, even grizzling a little, but learns to be calm and to be soft, to listen to her when she speaks and to express his feelings without flying into a strange, ancestral rage.

The others are resting in the early afternoon heat. The foals sit in a group, bickering, and when they see Ben they call to him.

“Come,” Kylo says to Rey, when Ben goes to the other foals. “Come to the town with me, _dousa._ ”

“I don’t really need anything.”

He bends and kisses at her temple. “We’ll be alone…”

Her laughter makes a pair of magpies dart to another branch in fright. Ben joins them and clambers into their embrace, gap-toothed and perfect. “We’re going to find cherries, _tadig,_ ” he tells Kylo, and touches Rey’s hair. The other foals are congregating, angelic with painted sticks and woven baskets on their backs. “We’ll all go, we’ll all go and pick them.”

“You go, sweetheart. We’ll wait for you.”

“Come,” Ben insists. “Rey, you come. _You_ come, _pleeeease._ ”

“You pick cherries for us, Ben, and then bring them back. We’ll end up eating them all off the tree. Your father will suck them up like a deer.” Rey makes an exaggerated sucking noise on Kylo’s cheek, and Ben squeals with laughter.

The children all set off together, messy-haired and prideful in their little herd, waving their painted sticks and their ash bows. Ben’s wolves follow.

Rey insists on tying Kylo’s hair into a knot. It’s so long now, so thick and so dark. He shakes it and it is deep night under the sun. “Stop, for God’s sake. You’re like a pony.”

The others laugh and jibe him when they see him in his Man-clothes, but though he is newly returned, he still holds stony weight, and so they only jeer lightly, never overstepping the boundary. Leia comes to look at him, aghast. “You look just like one!” she exclaims, touching the fine cambric of the white shirt. “Too tall to pass properly, but - gods - it’s like a play. How came you by these?”

“Rey made them. On a _loom._ ”

“A what?”

Rey smiles at that. Kylo’s kind sews things utterly by hand, no looms or weights to help them. Their clothes are beautiful and stolen and wild. “It’s like a bridge,” she tells Leia, “a tiny bridge made of wood. You string it with sheep’s wool and twist until it’s thread.”

The others make requests when Kylo asks; Jyn wants a dress - “it doesn’t _matter_ how big!” -, and Kaydel wants a pair of britches just like the ones Rey made for Kylo. Cassian gives Kylo a silver piece he found on the forest path and asks him to bring back a bag of oak galls and a fat pigeon, for feathers. Rey knows that he will bring them all what they ask for, but that he will not buy a single thing, so she grudgingly accepts Cassian’s silver coin when Kylo proffers it to her, lest he drop it between her breasts to keep her from refusing it.

Leia kisses them both good-bye, and they walk.

The thick summer air has cleared a little, and the wind is fresh from the river beyond. They follow the pale path, unbeaten by the feet of Men. In their good plain clothes, Rey looks a Woman and Kylo looks a Man, and they walk hand-in-hand. She wears boots and he does not. Rey wonders if she ought to take them off and cast them into the ferns.

“What does he want oak - oak - what did he ask for, again?”

“Oak _galls,_ ” he corrects her. “Have you ever seen the great lumps on the side of an oak tree?”

“Yes.”

“Those are galls. Wasps lay their eggs in them, and when you break them off they’re black inside.”

“Why does he want wasp eggs?” she asks, repulsed.

“For ink. The eggs go black and watery after a while, when they’re in the gall. For skin-marks. Like that Northman I found - Maul? He had skin-marks all over his face, wolves and bears and the like.” He reaches for her pierced ear and gives the carnelian hook a flick so that it swings. “I could give you one, if you like.”

“A skin-mark?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe,” she allows. He bends and kisses her hair.

“Do you feel better?” he asks. “Are you still frightened?”

A twig snaps in the hedgerows by the path before she can answer. Kylo puts himself in front of Rey in an instant, eyes sharp.

Rey hears a giggle, like a pealing of silver bells, and all of sudden there is a foal’s face peeking out from between the ferns, smiling up at them.

“Ben!” Kylo exclaims, sliding down the bank to get him. Ben squeals and laughs as he is swept up, hair full of disintegrating flowers.

“I _knew_ you’d go to town,” Ben says, griping even though he’s smiling. “I wanted to go, too. Take me to town with you, _tadig,_ please!”

Kylo carries him up and sets him down. Ben darts to Rey, clinging to her leg. “No, don’t,” Kylo says sternly. “You’re to go back now, go on.”

“I want to go to town!” the child protests. He pats Rey’s hips with insistent little hands and gazes up at her. “I want to go, please let me go with you, _please._ ”

Rey runs a hand through his hair. “Kylo, let him come.”

Kylo is unmoving. “Ben, go on back to the river.”

“Kylo!” Rey exclaims. “Let him come! What’s he going to do?” Kylo gives her a foul, loving look, lip curled in the irritation and amusement of one losing the favour of his child to one less stern. “Go _on,_ you beast, let the boy come to town.”

Beaming, because he knows he has won, Ben runs to his father and begs, “Carry me, _tadig_!”

“Carry you? No, walk. You walked all this way, didn’t you?”

“ _Carry_ me!”

“ _Walk,_ you lazy thing.”

Ben ends up on his father’s shoulders. He pulls apples and flowers from the trees above, hefted to a great height. Rey joins hands with Kylo once more.

They go to town - a sea-beast, a girl-seal, and their foal disguised as a Man, a Woman, and a Child.

  


\---------------------------------

At home, colour comes from the earth.

Wildflowers - red and blue and pink and yellow - sit thick in the meadows and on the green hills and in grassy mountain nooks. Women’s hair is copper and gold and jet, and their eyes are green and blue and brown. Bronze foxes dart through the woods. Magpies flit from branch to branch, breasts sweet white and backs the darkest, most exquisite blue. That is in the wildlands, the emptiness between settlements, though in Rey’s sparse hamlet it sprung, too, unfettered by the trampling boots of Men.

There is colour here, in the town of the Gauls. At home, in the big towns, the Gaels and the encroaching Norse favour silver and sheepskin. White and silver, alabaster and grey. The leather is brown and the furs are rich, but plain. Town walls are stone-and-wood, posts rising from mortared walls of rocks, and hung sparsely with the round shields of fallen Northmen, painted black or white or blue.

This town is far bigger than the high jut of the one Rey knows; walls built harder and higher, wooden posts sharpened to ungodly points. From them hang great painted banners - foxes, boar, strange white horses with horns protruding from between their eyes - and the men on the watching-walls wear dull grey iron on their shoulders. They stare at the trio as they pass under the wooden arch into the town, and when Ben beams at them, they smile back.

Plumes of smoke rise from pots and pits and braziers. Rey smell can the hot iron smell of a smithy. She can smell frying meat, leather tanning in barrels, tallow sitting solid in thick, soapy bars full of lavender and kelp and rose.

Here, the high-people wear russet fox and red linen, green cambric dyed with lichen scraped from rocks. So much _gold -_ she scarcely sees a single link of silver. The laymen wear fox, too, but no gold. That doesn’t surprise her. That, at least, is the same as home.

There are barefoot children here, like Ben, and big working barefoot men like Kylo. Women with no shoes lead animals past them, skirts hitched and tucked to stay clean of the dust. The day is hot, and so the ground is dry, but Rey knows that when the rain comes, hundreds of feet will track this grassless ground into a mucky mess. People give second glances, only because Kylo is so tall and because Ben is so charming. Men gawp at Rey, too, the way they did at home. When Rey pauses to admire a chained white owl on a wooden perch, the man selling it leans on the stall and looks at her in a sleazy way. Kylo’s flared-nostril huff and deep glower make him stand up straight and look elsewhere. Even Ben leans forward on Kylo’s shoulders and glares.

The dressmakers and the furriers call out to Rey and Kylo - “ _a new gown for the lady! Buy your lady a new pelt, ser!” -_ and Ben clings to his father’s hair, bouncing excitedly on his shoulders. He looks a proper child, rosy-cheeked and beaming, but still wild in his fox fur.

Rey can see people looking at him. He beams back at them, deathly endearing. They are, she knows, thinking the same as she had when first she saw him; _so beautiful, so gentle, let me love him._ Such are the advantages of the children of the long water, Rey thinks. They will never go hungry.

Rey has never seen so many colours of cloth; green, red, yellow, blue - lying in sheets over looms and folded in piles secured with soft twine. They pass a woman with grey hair in a raggedy braid down her hunched back, overseeing the selling of dresses and shifts and furs. Her teeth are yellow. Ben waves at her, and her eyes flash with the prospect of gold and silver.

Rey knows that Jyn wants a dress and Kaydel wants britches, and so she points the woman out to Kylo. “You could get them there,” she says. “Her things look nice.”

“Sweet boy,” the woman calls to Ben. “Call your mother near, and your father, too.”

Rey can see that Kylo dislikes this greatly - the woman speaking directly to Ben - and so he approaches her himself, Ben watching curiously from his shoulders. She can smell cooking meat from across the street, where women spit rabbits and chickens covered in honey and salt and rosemary and roast them crisp.

“Is it not a fine day, ser, to walk with your lady and your babe?” the woman asks him. Her face is so leathred it nigh on hides her eyes - shockingly green, like a cat’s.

“Fine enough,” Kylo says, and Rey is impressed with how Mannish he can be when he tries. He bends so that Ben can slide off his back, and Rey bring him to lean against her leg. Ben clutches at her skirt and watches the dresswoman curiously. “I have need of you - a dress, for a girl of twenty, and britches for a boy of the same.”

The hag eyes him, and looks at Ben. “That boy of yours is hardly ten.”

“It’s for my other boy, he’s almost a man now, and the dress is for my daughter.”

“Who is not this girl,” she presumes, looking at Rey.

“No,” he agrees.

“Your bedfriend or your wife?”

Kylo does not understand the veiled jibe, but Rey does, and says primly, “Married not three weeks ago, by the Lord - is that good enough?”

It seems to be good enough when Kylo produces gold and silver, to prove his funds, and instantly the woman grows kinder.

She will not simply sell him his needs and let him go. She babbles and rants so that the customer forgets themselves, shoving coloured cloths at them, expostulating over linens they _truly need_.

“Britches for your son and a gown for your daughter, ser, but no gown for your wife?”

“My wife has plenty at home.”

“No woman can have _enough_ gowns, ser. Buy your lady a gown, ser, don’t be cruel to her. Does she not deserve it, ser? Do you hear that, lady -” She appeals to Rey now, tugging at her dress. “He doesn’t think you deserve a new gown.”

Rey splutters. This is plainly a routine, a mummer’s play the old woman puts on to sell her cloth, but it’s so different to the sullen Norse merchants at home that it brings tears of laughter to her eyes.

The woman exclaims, “She’ll tan your hide when you go home this evening, ser, and then you’ll wish you bought her a gown to keep her quiet, won’t you, ser?”

Kylo’s face is as stony as ever, but his mouth twitches. “ _Oh,_ ” the hag says to Rey, “he’s a stubborn ox, is he not? Is he stingy, lady? Does he ever buy you treats?”

Rey presses her lips together to keep from braying. Ben giggles behind her skirts. “He _always_ buys me things, always-”

“-and what about your babe?” The woman reaches down and takes friendly hold of a lock of Ben’s hair. “Does Father buy _you_ treats, little lamb?” Ben smiles beatifically, angelic, and holds her hand. “Would the lamb like a new pair of boots?”

Ben squeals, “Yes! Yes yes yes! _Tadig,_ new boots!” He goes behind Rey and clings to Kylo’s thigh. “New boots, _tadig,_ she said I could have new boots.”

Rey is quite sure that Ben has never worn a pair of boots in his life, but she gazes up at Kylo regardless. The woman smiles a yellow smile at them all. Kylo gives in, eventually, to this game-of-Men, and the woman sits Ben on a wooden stool and measures his little bare feet with knotted twine. “How old are you, boy?” she asks, marking the knots with a stick of charred wood.

“I don’t know,” he tells her matter-of-factly.

“He’s nine,” Rey says carefully. Ben could be nine or ten, she thinks, tall for a child.

“Nine …” The woman pores over the stands and shelves of boots, some big enough for a giant and some small enough to fit the feet of a newborn babe.

Ben kicks his feet happily when they are booted. “Walk them over, child,” the woman tells him, and he does, pacing in the little boots. They’re made finely, leather tanned good and brown and the laces twisted firm.

“Do you like them, _tadig_?” Ben asks.

“I like them well enough. Do _you_ like them?”

“I _love_ them.”

“Perhaps a _foulinenn_ for the child,” the woman suggests slyly. “To keep his wee neck warm when the winter comes - and oh, _does_ the winter come. You don’t want your babe to freeze, do you?”

Kylo allows that, too. Ben is repulsed by the tanned wolfskins and refuses to touch them, but cautiously runs a hand over the thick dark bearskins. “I already have one,” he tells the woman, as if the shock of red fox about his shoulders is easily missed, “and these are too big for me.”

“I like those,” Rey tells Kylo, and he pinches her backside, “the bearskins. But they’re too big for me, too.”

The woman’s eyes flash with innovation. “Come, stand here, lady. Stand there, that’s it.” She sets Rey beside Ben and sweeps the bearskin from shoulder to shoulder, measuring, studying. “See, here,” she says to Kylo. “Your wife is small and your son is smaller still, ser - half a pelt would keep them both warm, would it not?”

Rey knows that Kylo is not hesitant because of the fiscal aspect. He is wary of Men - and Women - and does not want Ben to come to favour goods-of-Men as he grows, to mingle with them, to be anywhere near them. She pats Ben’s shoulder and smiles at Kylo, reassuring.

“Fine,” Kylo permits. “Half.”

The halved bearskin, when the woman slices through it with heated twin-blades, covers Rey down to her waist and Ben down to almost his knees. It looks like a little cloak. The woman affixes strange copper fibulae to both pelts. Ben dances about in his, squealing excitedly.

“Look at you _allowing_ things,” Rey giggles, squeezing Kylo’s thick waist. “Like a proper Man.”

He curls his lip at that, happy to see both her and the child content.

Before they leave the shaded district of clothmakers and tanners and furriers, the woman convinces Kylo to buy, for Ben, a jerkin of rabbit-skin and a little cambric shirt as green as the dress she implores him to buy for Rey. He gives in to both, on top of Jyn’s dress and Kaydel’s britches. Rey can only laugh at the silliness of it, and fusses fondly over Ben as he marches in clothes-of-Men. He is carried onto his father’s shoulders again.

In the pasture, where the town’s beasts are kept, a white mare stands at the fence. They go to her, and Ben leans forward in fascination. Rey watches both he and Kylo as they watch the horse. Kylo takes her muzzle in hand and meets her eye very seriously, man and child going still as stone.

The white horse blinks dumbly at him. Kylo runs a hand down her cheek even so.

Rey murmurs in his ear, “I’m going to go and buy a candle.”

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, I’ll be alright,” she insists. Kylo doesn’t look convinced. He hefts Ben into his arms and watches her go. “Stay here, I won’t be long.”

She disappears into the throng. She wants things to bring back to the others. Gifts don’t buy friends, but they can soften the binds of salt and spring, and make them more like to know her. She buys her candle - the man pulling them from the waxed barrel charges her a piece of copper, and when she gives him a silver he thanks her and bites it hard. She follows the long street of craftsmen, passing a steaming smithy, and passes a girl with a black goat on her way down the lane of foodstuffs.

There is fish, meat, birds; the fish is resting on hay-packed ice, twice as much seafood here as there is at home, silvery and wet and fresh; curing meat hangs from wooden stall-beams, while thick-fingered men chop bloody pungent flanks with great cleavers; fat ducks bicker in wicker cages. A row of braziers give flame to cooking meat; Rey sees rabbits and chickens and ducks roasting crispy and hot on spits. The girl turning the roasts looks like Rose, her eyes slanted and dark, her hair as black as night, glossy in the sun. Her accent is strange when she speaks to Rey, charging her a clipped copper coin for a small roast chicken and a baked rabbit. Rey insists that she take a silver, and she does. She wraps the meat in pulped paper treated in beeswax, and helps Rey pack them into the satchel.

“Do you know where I could find cakes?” Rey asks. “Cakes and sweet things.”

The girl points up the street to a strange stall with dyed green canopy protecting its wares and plumes of steam rising. “There, where the great oven is. You won’t miss it.”

“Thank you.”

_Treats for Ben,_ she thinks. She follows the path the girl pointed, trying not to get lost in the crowd of people, and smells butter and steam. There is a boy not much younger than she is sitting by a great stall of food, a tabby cat beside him that swipes at flies when they come near. In great wooden boxes, padded with clean cloth, are cakes slathered in honey and rolled in chopped hazelnuts, sweet buns full of currants, thick, buttery braided pastries full of stewed apple and strawberry. There are mountains of loaves and baskets of baked rolls - cheese-and-onion, smoked mackerel, chive-and-garlic. Rey examines them closely. She wonders if the other foals, wary of her, will warm to her if she brings them sweets, the way all children do.

She fingers the gold and silver in her purse, and buys as much as will fit in the satchel. The boy wraps the cakes in cloth, overjoyed at the money he is making. Rey pets the cat when it comes to her. One piece of silver and a clipped copper is all it costs. It is cheaper to buy food in Gaul, Rey finds, though she wonders if food costs the same everywhere, and it is that she simply has more money than ever she has known.

She buys a tied sack of what the boy calls _knaou -_ strange nuts in great shells that look like the brain of a sheep when husked and halved - and when she turns to leave, Ben is there, beaming up at her.

“You frightened me!” she scolds him gently.

“I wanted to find you!” He peers into her satchel and pokes at the packages in her arm. There’s a bag in his hand. “What did you buy? Can I see?”

“It’s a surprise. What have you got?”

“Galls for _tadig,_ ” he said. “They _stink._ ”

He takes hold of her hand and leads her back to Kylo and the white mare. Kylo is leaning on the fence, the mare snuffling at his ear, and when he sees Rey and Ben he stands up straight. “Don’t run away like that,” he scolds the boy, but Ben just holds his arms out to be carried, and Kylo indulges him.

“I can’t believe you gave in,” Rey says, when they pass under the great gate, watching-men staring them down. They watch Ben racing along, chasing cabbage-flies. In his new boots and jerkin and pelt, he looks like a little noblechild, the son of an earl or a horsemaster.

“He’ll tear those off as quick as piss.” Out of view of the child, Kylo gives Rey a sharp slap to the behind and balls his fist in the fine green linen, bunching her underskirt. “-and I’ll tear _this_ off quick as piss, too.”

“You ought to know better than to tear my dresses, you ugly beast.”

It has been a time since their lovemaking was _proper._ At home, it was nigh on nightly - Rey would go to bed deliberately early so that the hours they spent having sex would not impede on decent sleep. She will not count their most recent rushed union on the strand as proper.

Kylo rubs her behind instead now, soothing circles. “And what if I do?”

It is warm when they return. Kaydel puts on her britches and Jyn her dress, and Cassian takes the stinking galls away. Kylo goes to Damaz by the river. Rey brings cakes to Leia and the other women, and sits by her things with her back to a great tree.

Ben sits and eats with her, shockingly snug against her side. The other foals come to investigate the smell of sweet things, and when Rey produces the satchel full of cakes they squeal with excitement. They have, with the exception of the fair little girl that Rey gifted her raven, left her alone until now, wary.

They sit by her and touch her hair carefully, examine the sleeves of her foreign dress. Ben lords proudly over Rey, holding his arms out and pouting to stop her from being pawed. They are tentative in their movements, cautious of her and abnormally polite for children of their age.

_Their age,_ she thinks. _How long have they been this age?_

One of the children - a boy, hair as red as autumn - is watching her.

“My _tadig_ says you’re a seal.”

“Yes.”

Through a mouthful of cake, he asks, “Where’s your _reungwir?”_

The question shocks her. “I - well. I don’t have one.”

“But my _mammig_ says _all_ selkies have one.”

“My _tadig_ is Rey’s _reungwir,”_ Ben informs the other foals.

“But where are her sisters?”

“She doesn’t _have_ any sisters. It’s just Rey.”

A blonde boy exclaims, “Your _tadig_ kissed Rey, I saw him.”

The foals squeal. One blurts,“I saw him too, it was _yucky._ ”

“Kissed her on the _mouth!”_

_Ew_!”

The children descend into fits of giggles, spraying crumbs everywhere. The younger wolves lick them up and nudge the children for tidbits. Rey’s tart is snatched from her hand by a lanky white pup, immediately accosted by its siblings. They fight for the sweet with scrapping paws and young teeth, yipping. Ben whaps its muzzle lightly for its audacity and proffers Rey another tart from the bag, this one full of cherries. The sight sparks an _oh!_ in one of the children, and within moments Rey is presented with a great basketful of cherries on their stems, picked that afternoon by the other foals in their little herd.

Kylo falls asleep early that evening. The dusk is soft. He collapses onto the sheepskin and sets to snoring softly within minutes. Rey sits with Ben and the beasts around him. Ben diligently races beetles up and down Kylo’s back.

Ben asks her, “Did you live on a rock in Ériú?”

“No, I lived in a town, just like the one we went to.”

“Were there other selkies?”

“No, it was just me.”

“Just you - and Men?” The boy screws up his face.

“Just me and Men,” she tells him. “But not anymore.”

“No,” he agrees. He rests his head on her shoulder. The pup in his lap is fast asleep and snuffling. The air is cooling. Kylo snores.

“He sounds like a bear,” Rey whispers, and Ben giggles, imitating the noise sweetly. They look at his sleeping father for a moment longer. His face is half buried in Rey’s sheepskin, and he is drooling out of his half-open mouth. Rey touches his cheek, hot with sleep. He is beautiful still.

“I want to go to sleep,” Ben murmurs, and looks at her expectantly. She looks back, not understanding.

“Oh. Well - shall we wake your _tadig_?”

Ben looks at her as if she is stupid, and shifts the pup so that it yawns and totters back to its mother. He climbs into Rey’s lap - he is a heavy little thing - and curls up against her, mop of ringlets under her chin.

Rey sits very still. She has never held a child before like this, save for lifting a fire-obsessed infant away from the hearths at arm’s length, and Ben is very real and very solid.

She shifts so that she is snug against Kylo’s side, and rolls the sheepskin to lie under her. Ben clings patiently as she stretches for the bearskin to tuck over him. Kylo grunts in his slumber and throws a great arm over them both.

Ben touches her face in the dusky light, and drifts off to sleep.

She sleeps deeply for several hours with the solid little weight of the child bearing down on her. She is growing used to it, and wonders if Ben is, too. When she wakes, deep in the night, she needs to make water, and cautiously shifts the boy to lie beside his father. She darts down the slope and squats there. There is a stag watching her across the stream, chewing on bracken.

A _snap_ behind her makes it shoot into the trees, and two hands catch her shoulders. Rey gasps, and the hands squeeze. Her head is kissed.

“You scared me!” she hisses. He chuckles and leans on a rock to wait. “Kylo! Don’t look at me while I piss, you fucking pervert.”

They stroll to the river’s edge when she is done.

Rey says, “I think I’m growing on him.”

“I think so, too.”

“It’s such a weight gone. I was so shit-scared he’d hate me forever.”

“Both of you are too soft for that,” he jibes her.

In the trees above, an owl hoots. The night is warmer here. Rey goes to follow the river, but Kylo pulls her west, into the woods.

“Come, then.”

“To where?”

“Wherever. _Come_ , wife - or do I have to carry you?”

“Carry me, then, you impatient beast,” she exclaims, and he hefts her up over his shoulder, very purposely yanking up her dress so that her nethers are exposed to the air.

“Stop!” she squealed, giggling. “Kylo, put my dress down!”

“Why should I, when it’ll be off altogether?” He slaps her backside and she squawks. “There, will that warm you up?”

Rey can scarcely breathe from laughter. As he walks, he stifles her with a hand between her legs. Her breath catches. “Or this?” he asks. Leaves brush her back as they pass under a low-hanging ash. His fingers find her clitoris, and he sets to rubbing at it.

“You pig!” she huffs. “Where are we going?”

“Somewhere quiet.” His fingers press a little harder. “Just like at home, with the bluebells. Somewhere I can have you all to myself, hm?”

Her hair hangs in her face, but there is a steady throbbing in her chest and between her legs. “Will you make it all up to me?” she murmurs, mouth to his clothed back.

“Always. Anything.” His pace quickens.

“Oh, don’t,” she pants, but he keeps walking, keeps rubbing. The way his gait jostles her over his shoulder doesn’t help. She digs her nails into his back. “Kylo, don’t, I’m going to- I’ll _come,_ Kylo, _don’t._ ”

“For me, good girl,” he tells her, and she sees from where she is held that they have passed into a night meadow, soft with the light of the moon. A stream babbles on its periphery, rushing.

Rey comes. Suspended over his shoulder, six feet up in the air, she has nowhere to brace her feet, to arch her back up off, and so she must take it in its entirety. She wails at the heat of it. Kylo keeps her there until she is limp and finished, and lies her in the dark grass. The crotch of his britches bulges with erection.

“We stay until the morning,” Rey insists.

“Always.”

She is not sure what hour it is. She does not care. The sky is full of stars.

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Translations**
> 
> _Foulinenn_ \- pelt, fur cloak  
>  _Ebeul_ \- Foal, little one  
>  _Tadig_ \- dad, papa  
>  _mamm-gozh_ \- grandmother
> 
> You can get me on Twitter and Tumblr @hagenshall! Just be aware that blank accounts will be blocked unless it can be proven they're actual users, not trolls or rhino dicks. Thanks for reading!!


	4. Good News!

Hi lads,

This isn't a chapter, don't be mad.

You may have noticed I've been MIA both here and on Twitter for a long while. The reasons for this absence are thus:

1\. Some cunt who I would LOVE to name has gotten two of my main Twitter accounts suspended, the first by mass reporting and the second by trying to log into it and then mass reporting. I reckon it's because I told people, in a tweet directed towards no user in particular, not to use Irish stereotypes in their insults against that 15 year old Finnrey that keeps getting people banned, given that she's enough of a well-rounded cunt as is. I finished said tweet with 'you're a dog' and people thought I was _vewy vewy naughty and diswepectfuw fow saying such wude things_. Most likely they'll be reading this, in which case I'd like to invite you to stick your Lucky Charms up your fucking arse, you jobless prick.

  
2\. I had a very long brain fart in which the mess of the aforementioned and General Life Fuckery I lost all faith in myself, writing and my art. I half-considered deleting everything and disappearing off the web if I'm quite honest.

I came to delete the lot in a 2am fit of foolery and I saw a comment asking for Chapter 4, and telling me that the user was going 'into withdrawal' from lack of content.

You know me - someone demands something and my first thought is fuck off. Not this time though! read that comment and stared at it and thought 'you know what, fuck it, fuck all of it.' I'm going to be uploading my fucking fics, sniping or not, and the fool cunts trying to stop me can go and choke.

I'm gonna try working out a schedule, likely one that has been uploading weekly. Chapter 4 (5 now, I guess) is 90% finished. Expect it before the weekend.

My current Twitter account is @hagenshull. Like, the hull of a ship ... you'll never sink? Or whatever? Please do follow me there / ask me questions / give con crit or comments/ whatever, because I love yis all.

Weird one, but I just realised the horsefucker girl actually spoiled the basic plot of the upcoming chapter about a year ago on Twitter because she was pissy I outed her, so if anyone's seen it, apologies.

I have about a billion WIPs under my chin right now, but SITB will always take priority. Again, sorry it isn't a chapter. But it's the next best thing.


	5. The Night Land

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi im a terrible person life gets in the way don't h8 me pleaaaaase

He tells her that, if they were wild and unknowing - a  _ ronín  _ that fled her horde and the  _ each-uisce  _ that found her - he would come to her with his head low and his eyes soft, so that he wouldn't frighten her.

She will come down from her rock for the first time, dare to tread the beach though she is distinctly aware of the possibility that he is there, waiting. Her arms will be full of the things he dared leave for her; seaglass, carved sticks, quartz slapped into smoothness by the might of the sea.

He will find her promptly, and again she will be frightened by his size. He is almost like the hounds of Men, wanting to be close to her always, putting his head wherever she will let him. The  _ ronín  _ is a crafter -  _ was  _ a crafter - and on the horde's rock she wove baskets to moor to the basalt and suspend beneath the surface of the sea. To keep her hands occupied, she weaves more. She goes to the water's edge and the kelpie goes with her, curious. When she pulls up great hanks of seaweed, he immediately sets to helping her, so eager to help that it makes her laugh.

She will lie on her belly and twist the strands, braid them together. The kelpie will put his head on her back and fall asleep in the sun.

When they grow closer he will show her his mating sound, face near to hers, and in shock and awe she will demand he makes the curious noise again. He will, and she will clutch his face in wonder; wonder at this great wild thing, his curious sounds, his unending willingness to please her. She has never known a thing like this; only in dreams has she dared imagine being free.

Those dreams could be nightmares, sometimes; always plagued with beasts rising from the black water, dragging her off the rock with giant bloody hands. The  _ fearrón,  _ hateful, told them the water horses would take them, tear them apart, but now the  _ ronín  _ knows that it is nothing but lies.

\---------------

Rey knows that, when the wind blows in warm across the sea, and when the sky is thick and grey, heavy in one’s skull, it will storm. She knows that when goats and sheep bundle into the corner of their fences with no apparent cause, they smell a rank wolf on the wind. She knows that when a woman carries her pregnancy low, she will bear a boy. These things she knows, and has always known.

She wonders if she has always known these things; how to kiss and be kissed, how to embrace, how to know another deeply. If she has, she forgotten them, and it is only Kylo that has helped her to remember.

He is silver-white in the light of the moon, just as he was the night that she found his first mate-gift under her sleeping furs, the night he first took hold of her in the sea; bare, wet body an impossible and forbidden heat. She touches the dark grass beside her with both hands.

Kylo unties the waist of his britches. He looks quite as if he would rather tear them off, rip them open, but he is gentle with the things she made him, as Rey is sure he considers them mate-gifts.

He is erect, and his cock is heavy and swollen, bouncing as he casts his clothes aside. Rey pulls her shift over her head and Kylo takes that as well, dumping it onto the pile of crumpled cloth. He kneels between her legs where she lies and grunts in approval. Rey looks, cunt throbbing, at the vast white expanse of his chest, his belly, his arms.

He strokes himself and lets her see. He is full, ready, aroused - Rey lifts her head to see the crimson glans peeking through his prepuce, drinking in what she can see. The sight of a pearl of pre-ejaculate forming there makes her want to touch herself at the thought of it within her.

"Do you remember the first time?" she asks him. He lets her take hold of him, giving a soft thrust into her hand. Rey marvels at the heat. "How frightened I was?"

An owl calls in the night. Kylo kisses at her calf, her ankle where he has drawn her legs up against his shoulders. "I remember," he rumbles, "and I remember how you squalled when you came, and how you begged for me to do it again." He is so tall, so wide, that her heels scarcely touch his neck. With a great paw he pulls her backside into his lap.

"Wait," she breathes suddenly, and he goes still in the dim light. Rey shifts, moving him, and puts her legs about his thick waist instead. Kylo gives a grizzle, waiting with eyes as black as the sky above them. "Properly," she whispers. "So I can feel you." She runs a hand down his chest, his firm abdomen, to the dark thatch of coarse hair, to the weight of his warm cock again, back arching off the grass to reach.

"Properly," he repeats, as if he knows it not, and puts a hand on her chest. He lies her back down. His thumb finds her clit in the dark and kneads, soft but insistent. Rey whimpers when feels the beginnings of another orgasm already pooling in the pit of her belly.

"That's -  _ oh- _ "

He takes his hand away and sinks into her slowly, as if it is the first, and Rey closes her eyes. The grass is cool under her. Kylo groans with pleasure, sinking deep. Rey could sink, too, deep into his chest. She takes him with no trouble, not anymore; whenever she wants of him she is wet and open and ready, and if she isn't he will see to it that she is  _ made _ ready. 

He nuzzles against her cheek, huffing, and then he is fully within her, hands rooted firm at either side of her face. 

Rey is as full as she can possibly be. The weight of him will bear down on her swollen clitoris, and if he is able for love two and three and four times, she will climax tonight until she faints.

Without looking, she murmurs, "Please."

Kylo lowers himself gently, as if Rey is easily broken, and presses his belly, his chest against hers. The sensitive insides of her thighs squeeze his hips as she locks her ankles about his waist, heels in the small of his wide back. 

They will mate this way, in the deep of the wood, on this isle of the undying.

His hips roll heavily into her, his knees drawn up under her thighs, his arms tucked under her head to support it. Rey feels every solid ounce of him, feels every shudder and twitch, hears every grunt and groan.

Kylo rolls her onto her back when she has climaxed twice, urges her onto her hands and knees. Rey lazes on her elbows, showing herself to him, and then slyly rolls back to where she was so that he huffs and grunts and rearranges her.

“You behave,” he growls, rare words in this heat, and she sighs when he pins her and mounts her all at once. He laves over her, hot tongue in her mouth and on her neck, her chest, her shoulders. The pace of his hips against her behind is steady and strong and neverending. How he focuses Rey does not know. She turns her head and bites at his lip with more force than she intended and is rewarded with a snarl, all white teeth and curled lip.

It has been bare months - not even a year - and already she feels that he has been hers forever. 

There is not much talking, not anymore. She comes to understand that Kylo is what Leia said he is - salt-born, born of the wild sea, seeded by thunder. The talking was a way to feel almost human, to help Rey, to ground her. She is still his reunig, his dousa, his kazeg, but most of their words now are sweet breaths and moans and mating-songs.

He comes up off her back a moment - Rey whimpers at the loss of heat - and she dares, errantly, to push him to his back so that she can ride him, knowing in her own mind that he will refuse this with delightful rage.

Kylo snaps, putting her on her back again, hands firm on her waist. “I want to be on top,” she insists, and he refuses with a growl and a furious shake of his head, dark locks askew. 

“Why not?” she demands, though she relishes this argument and his insistence at being the one to serve her - never the opposite. She wonders; she supposes the great saltborns find it almost emasculating, a slight to their very being, that their mates would even consider the notion of straying from being the very focus of this most intimate fashion of showing love.

He says, blithely, “Because,” and leaves it and that, descending upon her breasts with a wild mouth.

Kylo fucks her steadily, as if it was all he was made for, back broad and strong, big thighs hard under her backside and hands and immovable grip about her hips where he holds her. He plunges himself deeply into her, huffing and grunting, and when he puts all of his weight onto her, spilling and spilling, she thinks that she might happily die, conscious only of his great weight, of his cock and seed inside her, of his teeth grazing love and pleasure at her throat.

They make love a third time, then a fourth, then a fifth. The sixth time comes when they wake after they drift off, intertwined, asleep in the weariness than only sex brings and works into one’s very bones.

Whe black sky lightens to violet-grey, streaked with bold pink like a split salmon, Rey looks at this great, beautiful beast. Home feels like a dream, Lughnasadh feels like a story, and the marriage feels like a myth told by blind and ancient women. Land's End has clouded the recent memory. It feels as if all she knows is the long headland and the white river.

He looks back at her, eyes soft in the pinkening dawn. Rey touches his cheek. "Pretty," she murmurs, and he nibbles softly at her fingertips. Wild beastly thing, she thinks, but minds it not, for they are almost the same.

Not human, not at all; Rey tilts her head back, puts her cheek to his, and he begins to purr, the softest expression of love he knows. Too wild to be human, too strong, too gentle. 

_They talk and eat and make things,_ she thinks _, but they are wild things, and_ ** _you're_** _a wild thing, too._

Kylo bites softly at her shoulder. She can feel his purring through his chest and into her back. When she shifts, even to stretch herself, he grizzles in protest, arms an iron gibbet around her middle.

"You let me move if I want to," she says.

" _ Stay _ ," he growls, monosyllabic in his feral rest, and worries gently at her earlobe with his teeth. She could smack him, she thinks, and they would roll and fight and mate again. She lets him instead, and when she sighs softly in pleasure Kylo reacts, grunting in interest.

"Not again," she huffs, though she would like to. She looks at him boldly. "I feel - I feel fucked raw."

"Fucked raw," he muses.

"You know," she insists. "Too much for one day." She rolls a little and sighs, purposely arching her back against his loins and looking at him over her shoulder. "Sore. But you can lick me better, if you like." 

Voice hoarse with need, he grunts, "Don't tease me, woman."

Rey says nothing, but parts her thighs and touches herself there, facing away from him purposely as if it is a secret. 

He is on top of her and has her on her back in an instant, as if insulted.

"Mine," he growls, pushing her hand away. 

"Mine," she echoes petulantly. Kylo shows her his teeth, rumbling.

Rey squeezes her breasts instead, deliciously spiteful. " _ Make _ it yours, then, beast," she dares him, and he does. 

He is careful to be gentle with his tongue; she is tender and oversensitive, and even the soft wetness of his tongue is magnified tenfold when he licks at the pink of her still-swollen clit. Her legs feel as weak as butter when they rise. Kylo carries her to the stream beyond and they luxuriate in one another's mouths as they stand in the cool rushing water, tongues slow and wet.

"I feel better," she whispers in his ear, warm and trembly despite the stream. "I'm not achy now."

"Were you sore?" he murmurs.

"Yes, here." She touches her lower belly, her mound. "I missed you inside me. I missed your tongue."

"I won't let you miss it again," he swears, wet body firm against hers. 

They wash and dress. Rey's hair is damp and sticks to her back when she pulls on her shift. She finds the air cold though it is barely autumn. She says to him, "Will it snow, come winter?"

"Yes. You'll feel it more than we will." He ties his britches. "I'll build you a nest, like your hut, so you can bundle up like you did at home. You won't be cold then."

"A nest. Are we birds?”

He gives her a look. She says, “I want to see snow. It only snows a little at home. Mostly it’s just frost and ice.”

“It’s heavy here. Do you want to go back now?”

She does, and they do. The morning is cool, and as they walk the sky lightens. They see, up the slope of slanting trees, a doe peering over the undergrowth at them with wet concerned eyes. Rey says, “There’s a deer, look.”

“Do you want it?”

“No! No- don’t!”

“Did you eat?”

“I haven’t  _ stopped _ eating. Fruit and rabbit and nuts. I’ll be big like a cow by the time we get home.”

“I think it’d take more than a few apples to make you big like a cow. We’ll go to the town again, in a few days, and you can get one of those clay pots to put food in, if you want to.”

“Maybe.”

They cross another stream, a crop of rocks, a fallen tree; Rey goes nimbly across it while Kylo traverses the juts of granite underneath. He holds his arms out and tells her to jump, and when he does he catches her deftly. 

The first thing they see when they pass into the clearing, the bank of the river, is Ben, racing towards them. Rey feels an immediate horror - they left him there, in the night - but Kylo seems less concerned. He lifts the child up into his arms and Ben exclaims, “Where did you go?” He is wearing his new  _ foulinenn _ \- almost a cloak about his slight child’s shoulders. 

“For a walk around the headland,” Kylo tells him.

“Did you go too, Rey?”

“Yes, it was a very long walk.”

“Can I go next time?”

Rey exchanges a look with Kylo, who presses his lips together to keep from laughing. “No,  _ ebeul _ , I think it’s too far for your little legs.”

Ben seems too distracted by a commotion at the riverline to protest. The others have crowded there, knee-deep, in a tight half-circle, and she hears their chatter on the air. Children try in vain to peek around their parents’ hips. “What happened, Ben?” Kylo asks.

He clings to his father and whispers, “Mon Mothma,” as if it is a grave secret. Kylo looks down at the shoreline.

“Who’s that?” Rey asks.

“The old mare,” Ben recites, as if it is a song he has learned. “She saw Epona.”

Rey looks to Kylo for explanation, and he urges her down with him to where the others congregate. Ben gets down from his father’s arms and races to join the other children wading into the water. When Rey steps into it, it is cool and clear, river pebbles smooth under her bare feet. The children bob in the deeper shallows, awestruck. The others greet them softly, low voices, and when Rey follows Kylo into the shallows, she sees why. 

There is an old woman being helped out of the river. Ben whispers, “There she is. She sleeps in there. How old is she,  _ tadig _ ?” 

“Hush,  _ ebeul _ .”

_ Old _ . Rey watches this ancient woman. She could be seventy, but moves as if she is a hundred, and her close-cropped hair might once have been red. She is naked - Rey averts her eyes in reared-up respect - but those surrounding her wrap her in a linen and a fur, a great bear’s skin. It is, to Rey, unsettling to see one of Kylo’s kind so ancient, to need so much help.

“Who is she?” Rey whispers, so quiet she is almost inaudible. 

“She’s an old mare,” he returns, even softer. “One of the first. Her  _ mammig _ was herded with Epona.”

Even as the day is brightening, the air stays cool and crisp, the sky ambiguously bare. The old mare walks slowly, as if she has forgotten how. The others, having walked her carefully up the bank, sit her at the entrance to the stick longhouse and surround her. She touches the faces of curious foals and takes the hands of those sitting by her. Kylo stands by Rey, a respectful distance so their presence did not crowd the woman. 

Leia is there, hunched in reverence. From the fire and the stone bowl it is heating she ladles up a hewn-bone cup of something steaming, and gives it to the old woman. She lifts it with trembling hands. The skin on the backs of her hands is pale and nearly translucent, the veins blue snakes underneath.

She sips - the steam of whatever it is blows out of her nostrils in a white dragon’s puff - and she croaks, “How long did I sleep?”

“Long enough,” Leia tells her. Rey sees Han there, too, in the flock of riverborns. She realises that they have congregated on one side of the woman, and that the saltborns sit firmly on the other.

Ben, fascinated, shifts himself so that he is next to her, and peers at her old face. It becomes clear to Rey that this child, in relative terms, may never have seen someone of his own kind so old. Mothma looks back at him. She sets the hot cup between her knees and reaches for his little hands.

“What moon is it, _ebeul_ _bihan_?”

“I don’t know,” he tells her. “Your hands are cold. Are  _ you _ cold?”

She doesn’t answer. She turns her head; inhales, exhales, inhales again. She looks past Ben to where Rey stands. 

Rey looks back at her. The old mare’s eyes are tired, but knowing. Rey feels frozen to the spot.

Mothma sniffs the air, blinks slowly, and says, “Have I slept for so long?” She looks up at Leia. “Selkies, come inland?”

“Just the one,” Leia tells her. “My son’s mate.”

Mon Mothma says, “The dead son?”

“Not quite.”

“Note quite,” Mothma repeats, softer. She looks at them again, face unreadable. 

Ben tells her, “That’s Rey. She found my  _ tadig _ so he could come home and remember. He saw you when he was little.”

“Yes,” Mothma breathes. “Tell them, _ebeul_ _bihan_ \- tell them to come near.”

Kylo brings Rey forward, but Ben still rises to tug their sleeves, to bring them close. The others part to allow them near. Ben settles back where he was beside the old mare. Rey kneels in front of the huddled woman, uncertain. 

“Bend, dead man,” Mothma says to Kylo, squinting. “These arms don’t lift the way they once did.”

He does, face grave. Ben leans on the old mare’s shoulder, and she smiles. “Beautiful child,” she says, and the others coo and murmur. “Beautiful foals, all of them - new foals. I’ve slept under it all.”

She reaches for Kylo. He kneels, gives her his face, and she takes it in those wrinkled and ancient hands, closes her eyes, and says nothing.

Everyone is utterly still; even Ben, who sits and stares in awe.

“Yes,” Mothma gasps, startling them all. “I remember. The biggest foal of all, the saltborn in the wood.” Her eyes open. “You’ve grown, dead man.” She gives his cheek a light slap. “You were a wild thing when last I saw you. How came you by your first death?”

“Men,” is his only answer.

"And your second?”

His lip twitches. “The same.” The others chuckle around them, and even Mothma smiles.

“Yes, that’s right. Twice they made to strike you down and twice you rose again. You’re still the wild thing you were. Let me see the  _ reunig _ now.”

Kylo moves so that he isn’t in the way, going to sit by Ben, and Rey is left to present her face to the old mare. 

Voice hoarse in the way that the elderly's often is, Mon Mothma insists, "Lean forward, selkie, or these old arms might break.”

Rey does. The old hands are river-cold and almost damp on her cheeks, long-nailed fingers curling around her jaw. The skin of her face is thin, too, her cheekbones stark under it, closed eyelids sky-dark. 

She holds her face for a long time. No one speaks - no one even dares move. Rey does not look away from this old face, wary to disrespect her, but she can see and feel the awe of those around her. A crow calls from above, through the sound of birdsong in the trees.

Without opening her eyes, Mothma says, “I dream for years upon years.”

Rey is stock still, unmoving. Mothma’s teeth are clean and white, misaligned in the way most are, canines ever so slightly defined. “I dream of the very Beginning,” she murmurs. “I dream of the Sun Stallion and the Moon Mare and the Star Foals. I dream of Epona and her herd. I dream of every single one of the people here - my own kind.” She looks right into Rey’s eyes, their noses an inch apart. Her breath smells of long night, cool and endlesss and oddly sweet.

"And you. I dreamed of  _ you _ , once, selkie-come-inland.”

Rey feels a strange cool chill running up her wrists, her arms, her chest. The others crane their necks to see and strain to see, frozen in anticipation. “You were with Men,” Mothma whispers, “as if you were their babe. But here you sit now.”

Mothma turns her head slightly to look at Leia. “The dead man comes home with a selkie-of-Men. Isn’t that a story?”

“What does it mean?” Kylo interrupts, a little urgent. Rey is surprised to see concern on his face rather than the reverent awe of the others. 

“I don’t know,” Mothma says. “Not yet. But I will.”

“Kylo,” Leia says lowly, warning.

Mothma lets go of Rey’s face. “Peace,  _ kazeg-mamm _ . The dead man fears for his mate. He shouldn’t, but he does.” She looks at Kylo, tired eyes quite hard. “Do you trust your Sight, dead man?”

“Always.”

“But you do not trust mine.”

“You’ve not shown me why I should.”

“Then I will. But not yet. I’m tired. I would eat.”

Rey goes to Kylo as the others disperse for food. Some stay with Mothma. Rey wonders, absentmindedly, if they will bring her the light food she sees them nibble at in late evening - apples, cobnuts, honey, fowl - or something bigger, like Men. Ben follows Rey, and she hefts him up into her arms and says, “are you alright?”

“Yes. I like Mon Mothma.”

Gruffly, Kylo says, “Pity about her. I don’t like it.”

“You don’t like what?” Rey asks. 

“What she said. She saw you, one seal out of thousands, I don’t like it, I don’t trust it. Something could happen.”

“Have you seen something that could happen?” Rey asks him. “Because I haven’t. We always do.”

“Still.”

“ _ Tadig _ , I didn’t see anything either,” Ben supplies helpfully. “But I always have  _ nice  _ dreams. They’re never bad.” He lays his head on Rey’s shoulder.

Rey looks at Kylo, his furrowed brow, his pursed lip. “Will you stop worrying,” she says, poking him. “Come on. Look at me. I’m fine. What could happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“There you are, then. Silly thing.”

Before he can answer, she hears Leia call, “Kylo!  _ Donet _ !” She stands at the riverline alone, face expectant.

“ _ Caden _ ,” Kylo grumbles. “Watch til I get my ear bent. Are you alright to be without me for a few hours?”

“What am I, a baby? We’ll be fine.”

He kisses them both, Rey on the lips and Ben on the forehead, and lopes down the bank to his waiting mother. Rey watches him go.

“Well,” she says to Ben, shifting his weight onto her hip, “that’s that, then. Shall we go and play?”

Gravely, Ben reminds her, “I’m going to pick cherries. You said you’d come, too.”

_ Shit _ . She wanted to stay by the river, by Kylo. “Oh - well, I-”

“You come too,” Ben insists. “You said you’d come next time - it’s next time  _ now _ .”

“I know, but-”

“It’s next time  _ now _ ,” the foal whines, tugging at the neck of her dress. “ _ Pleeeaase _ , it’s next time  _ now _ .”

She gives in to him - how could she not? He takes her to where he has left his little wicker basket - piled in the middle of nine snoozing wolves - tucks it over his shoulders, and pulls her into the thick of the forest. 

He insists upon holding her hand as they trek deeper, as if she will get lost. Though the sun is shining by now, the air remains crisp, almost nipping. Rey can scarcely walk for the insistent wolves packed tight around them. When Rey accidentally trods on an errant paw, kissing and petting the offended beast as compensation, Ben orders them to disperse, and they do so reluctantly, loping out in twos and threes to explore, returning frequently to look over their little master as if he will disappear if not looked over.

One of the younger wolves catches sight of a hare and sets to chasing it, sparking the rest to follow. Ben breaks into a sprint and follows their lead, calling, “Come on, Rey!” and she does.

There is so much sky here. Rey could get lost under so much sky. She races, new surefootedness keeping her going from rock to rock, loose hair whipping her back with every leap. Ben hurls himself over a great fallen tree, studded with a bloom of brown mushrooms, and Rey kicks half of them off as she leaps.

The fruited grove is not far, but Rey is panting when they finally come to it. Ben bolts from her and goes straight up a heavy mother tree. Rey has only seen cherries twice; once in a basket in the town at home, looked over by a Saxon as big as Kylo, bald with a brown beard down to his chest and a buxom dark-haired wife that sat on a crate and played with a white kitten. Their tongue was strange, thick and guttural, and so Rey could stare at the shining fruit from afar, dark-bloody-red, and so fat she was sure they’d split open with the barest brush of hungry teeth. The second time was weeks before now, a gift from the foals, though she’d not had time to taste them before being called to play.

They are plentiful here. Ben climbs the tree, leaning backwards with just a single hand keeping him up, and takes a great dark bunch of cherries in the other. “Look!” he exclaims, and drops them on her head. 

“Oh! - Jesus.”

Rey manages to catch the cluster of garnet-dark fruit as they fall from her forehead. She finds them heavy in her hands. Ben squeals with laughter, a sound so beautiful that Rey is sure that it is making the birds sing. The wolves cry and scratch at the bark of the tree below, and so the foal fills his basket and descends.

They sit and eat. Ben plays in the dirt beside her, alternating between chewing fruit and digging with his hands. Rey scratches the grey wolf under the chin, then the brown, until all of them crowd around her impatiently for affection, again trying to lick the inside of her mouth. Ben fetches a branch and uses it to weaken the dirty before digging again. He is a feral cherub with his sticks wolves and soft eyes.

The cherries are as fat and as sweet as she had imagined they would be.

One of the pups snuffles at the pile of cherry pits that Rey has collected beside her. The fruit is so sweet that its juices prick at the inside of her cheeks. 

“Rey,” Ben begins, fiddling with something in the dirt. 

The sun shines brighter, but still not as baking hot on her back as it was a month ago. “Yes?”

“Are you going to have a baby?” he asks her pointedly, eyes wide with child’s innocence.

Rey goes still, breath caught in her throat, cherry juice pooling there. She tries to speak and finds her tongue made of sweet red stone.

Ben carries on, uninterrupted. “I had a dream about a baby,” and goes back to what he is doing, the pups trying valiantly to wrestle his sticks from him. 

Rey swallows, mouth wet, her stony tongue no help. The pup steps in the mound of pits and gets it paw all cherry-red. “When - when did you dream that?”

“When I was asleep.”

“Yes, but when?”

He gives her an odd look. One of the pups leaps up and gnaws the stick. Ben relinquishes it and plays with the dirt. “Last night. Before you went for the walk.”

“What was the dream - what did you dream of?”

“The baby,” he repeats, and proffers his palm. “Do you want to see a spider?”

She lets him put the biggest spider she has ever seen into her hand. It’s black, and so big she can see every one of its eyes, so wide it scarcely fits on her hand. It goes still in her palm, stretching its spindly dark legs one by one.

“What did the baby look like?”

“Like a  _ baby _ looks.”

“Yes, but what did  _ this _ baby look like?”

“Small.” Ben bats a pup away as it tries to snatch the spider from Rey’s hand. “Babies are  _ all _ small, and a bit ugly, I think.”

The spider tries to make its way up Rey’s wrist, and so she passes it back to Ben. He has amassed a horde of childish treasures in the dirt; spiders, worms, woodlice, sticks, stones. The cubs are allowed to play with the sticks, but frequently he must pry open the jaws of one to retrieve a stone they have stolen from his collection. 

_ Baby _ , Rey thinks.  _ Fuck _ .

When they return she chews more seeds to be doubly sure, and chews another handful after that. Kylo and Leia are sitting in with Mon Mothma, speaking quietly. Kylo rises briefly to greet her.

“My mother’s telling her everything.”

“What about?”

“Everything. Me, you, everything she slept under.”

“Right.” She doesn’t mention Ben’s dream. “Will you be very long?”

“I might. I’ll see you tonight, if I am. Give me a kiss, will you.”

She does. Ben reaches up to be hugged. “We picked cherries,” he tells his father.

“Did you? Give me some, then, so I don’t starve to death.”

Ben gives him the half-empty little basket, and from it he fishes a handful of cherries, locked together at their knobbly stems. Rey watches him go. Ben tells her. “Why is  _ tadig _ talking to Mon Mothma?”

“I think she’s telling him a story _ , a leanbh _ .”

“I like stories.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. I like stories about Epona. Do you have stories about  _ reunen _ ?”

“Not really.”

“Or stories about Men?”

“I do have some of those,” she tells him. “Shall I tell you some?”

“Not yet,” someone says from behind them, and when Rey turns she sees Kylo’s struck father, handsome and almost fair.

“ _ Tad-gozh _ , did you see Mon Mothma?” Ben asks him. Rey notices that he does not run to Han and cling to her the way he does to Leia. 

“I saw her, pup. Will you run on and let me talk to Rey a minute? You can run and find a fish for the wolves.”

Ben hesitates, looking at Rey. Rey feels a sort of indignance at Han’s words, at his instruction to Ben -  _ he can go where he likes _ ! - but keeps it to herself.

“Go on,” she says to Ben. “I won’t be long.”

He goes, taking the wolves with him, and takes a moment to look back warily at them both as he goes down to the riverline.

Rey turns to Han. “What do you want?”

“A word.”

“Go on.”

“We haven’t spoken,” he offers, genial. Rey can see, in Han, the parts that Kylo inherited; heavy brow, long face, thick neck. The girls at home would fall under a spell for men that look like Han. 

“You’ve not spoken to  _ me _ .”

“It goes both ways, does it not?”

“Does it?”

He smiles tightly. “You might walk with me, then,  _ reunig _ , so it can go both ways.”

Rey looks back at the river, uncertain. Han says, “It’s not you he’d be sour with if he found out, it’s me.”

“ _ Why _ is he so sour at you?” she demands.

He holds out his arm as if making a path. “I’ll tell you.”

Prideful and indignant in a strange, spousal dislike, Rey goes.

Han asks her, as they walk north, “Have you a mother?”

“Yes.”

"A  _ human _ mother,” he presumes.

Rey goes a little pink. She feels almost bare without Ben at her hip or Kylo at her side or the other women around her like a herd of her own. “What of it?”

“Nothing. I just find it strange how someone reared by Men,  _ like _ Men - how someone like that comes across one of us.”

_ Fate _ , she thinks, but says instead, “Coincidence?”

He smiles, stepping over a tree root. Rey realises they are going in the same vague direction as the path leading to the sea. “Maybe.”

“How does a streamborn come together with a saltborn?”

“That’s a story, isn’t it?”

“You ought to tell it if you’re so interested in mine.”

He dares laugh. “Ought I?”

They walk in relative quiet until the trees begin to give way. Rey expects to see rock and marram, but they are trekking higher, sloping upwards towards the sky. She can smell the sea.

“Where are we going?”

“Just up here.”

Rey follows him up a cluster of wind-worn rocks, studded all with flaky lichen, and climbs up onto a grassy, tree-shaded flat. When she stands, the sea is laid out all beyond her, seamed with foam and moving. The cliffs. She realises that she stands at the very top of the grey headland, and below her, the sea laps hard at the foot of the high brown rocks.

Suddenly she is gripped with concern.  _ What does he mean to do, throw me off? _ She looks at him, face set in fury, and he exclaims, “You’re your husband’s wife, always scowling. Sit, by hell. all I want to do is talk.”

“About what?”

“Things that you ought to know.”

Rey sits a little away from him, wary. “Kylo won’t talk to you,” she says, “why?”

Han sits, too, and sighs. Around his neck is a fine and oddly human chain of whitish silver. “That,” he says, “is a very long story.”

“You brought me up here.”

“Fine. Fine,” he concedes. “I was ashamed of him, once.”

How anyone could be, Rey cannot not fathom. “I’m from the south - deeper inland, far away. Where I come from, no one has ever known a saltborn not to be wild. Vicious.”

“But  _ Leia _ -”

“Leia is different,” he interrupts. “He looks down at his hands as if to wring them in the old shame. “Leia is .... gentle. I loved her. I still do. I love Kylo. He’s my son, but only child, but he’s salt to the very bone."

Rey stares at him. A red-breasted robin alights on a low branch above and twitters at them. “Then what are  _ you _ ?” she asks.

He looks back at her for a long moment, and sighs again.

“Epona crossed the Long Water with her herd. You know that - surely he told you that?”

“He did, yes.”

“She made her home by the edge of the land, on the fields and the woods by the bay and the strands by the sea. Never far from the water.  _ That _ herd’s food was Men.” He seems uncomfortable, and swallows hard. “Some of the herd grew to find it foul. They saw themselves in Men and saw Men in themselves, and left her and came inland to find water. Their food was the beasts of the wood and the river. They didn’t hate Men after that. Long before even Mon Mothma was a foal. That’s the short of it.”

The robin flits away. Han shifts where he sits.

“We all changed. They grew wilder and we, if you listen to any saltborn, went soft. Not true, but they’ll believe what they believe.”

“How does that make you so different?” Rey asks, impatient. “People - Men - eat different things all across the land. How are you any different?”

He shakes his head. “No. We changed. We gave up the bruteness. They’re wilder - born that way.”

“And what way are your kind born?”

“Not like them.”

Rey resists the temptation to roll her eyes at him, to scoff. 

Han looks down at the bay from this great height. “I found Leia in that bay. It feels like so long ago - it  _ is _ . We were two different kinds, but it didn’t matter. You understand that, surely. I used to sit up here and watch her, and she’d sit down there and watch me. Kylo was born down there, in the lagoon. Leia stayed there with him and I - I left. I couldn’t cope being around the other saltborns. I shouldn’t have - they were testing me, the men especially. They’d do anything for their women, they’d die for them, and if you’re a speck less than good enough they’ll never let you know peace. “

“I’d noticed.”

Han half-smiles at that. “Leia brought him to the river when he was a child. Not by her choice, exactly - I asked her to. I thought it would make him gentle, and I wanted to know him. I thought he was difficult when he was young, but he wasn’t, not to anyone but me and my kind. I tried to make him gentler and he fought me. She look him back before he grew into a colt.”

Bitterly, Rey accuses him, “It’s more than that. There’s something you won’t say. He hasn’t spoken to you in years and years - he wouldn’t do that for nothing.”

Han doesn’t look at her. “Some things ought not to be said.”

“I want to know.”

Neither of them speak for a long time. The robin returns and flits down to the dirt, pulling at it for worms. Rey watches it, watches Han. He is looking out at the sea beyond and below as if he is searching for something on the sun-bright water.

“I lost the run of myself.”

Rey asks, “How?”

He sighs. “Kylo went after a wolf, one day, by the river. He was young. He went into his hunger and he did it in front of the others, frightened them. I called him a - a shepherd-foal, a demon, a merrow - I swore he wasn’t mine, that some big saltborn down the bay had seeded him.” His nostrils flare - like Kylo, Rey notes. “I even - I even slapped him about the head. He bit me so hard it almost took my hand off. He fought me for it and - and he cried. He ran away. Leia beat me and threw the gifts I’d given her at my feet and took him home.” Han pulls back his sleeve and shows her the faint, jagged remains of small, jagged half-moon gouges from palm to mid-forearm; the scars of a frightened child’s teeth. 

Rey blinks back tears and swallows her revulsion.

“He was just a little  _ boy _ ,” she defends him, this child Kylo, this poor outcast thing. She imagines him in Ben’s image, eyes large and brown, tearful, hurt. She could beat Han for what he is telling her, but stays her hand and listens.

“Yes. He was a child -  _ my _ child - no matter how wild he was. He was a little boy. I regret it every day. He’s hardly said a word to me in - gods, I don’t know how to explain it in a way someone as young as you would understand.” Han’s brow furrows and knits as he thinks, and in that, too, he is like Kylo. “Nine hundred years, maybe. a thousand. Maybe more.”

A thought invades Rey’s head of someone doing the same to Ben; slapping him, calling him foul things. a strange new urge curls around her stomach _. I’d kill them,  _ she thinks _. I’d tear them to pieces if they tried.  _

“I went to see him when he was older, out at the bay. He wouldn’t talk to me, of course, and I kept insisting. I got angry. Told him it had been long enough, but that I wasn’t surprised - a stubborn saltborn, his mother as well. He lost his temper and -” Han trails off and again looks at the sea below them.

Rey sniffles. “What?” she asks, irritable. “You smacked him again? Called him every name under the sun?”

He gives her a look, though his expression is resigned. "No. We fought. Badly. Badly enough that he would have killed me, maybe, if he was allowed to keep going. That's the difference, you see - their kind will beat you until you're dead, or fight until their last breath. Ours will stay the fight to stay alive."

The wind blows. It goes through her shift so she can feel it all around her hips, her back. Rey tucks her hair behind her ear. The sea glitters under the cool bright sun.

"Ben's mother, before she had him, would have bitten the breeze for blowing on her, but she sent Kylo away until she was sure the anger was gone from him," Han goes on, lifting a hand as if the wind was thread to weave between his fingers. "It was never gone, but it was brought to an ember, I think, for a long time before she was killed."

"He told me about her. About Mina."

Han gives a huff. "They didn't love one another." He takes a handful of grass, tears it by the sod, and casts it over the edge of the cliff. "She was every kind of sea swash there was; selkie, wolfwalker,  _ merrow _ \- you could see it in her face. There are wolfwalkers in the west and merrows in the bay before that. That's where Ben gets it from, all the wolves."

"Why did they have Ben, then? If they didn't love each other?"

"I don't know. Our kind don't often make mistakes like that, and saltborns even less so." Han casts another sod and wraps an arm around his knee, the other leg extended before him. "She loved that child more than anything on this earth. I'll give her that. And she didn't deserve to die the way she did."

He looks at her, her concerned face, and offers, "They were young, as our kind go. Fallow-seeds are forgotten. Rare, but it happens. Leia says that she can See that the gods only willed Ben. Not for them to be one another's mate." He curls his lip in distaste.

Rey drags at the grass beside her. She wonders what god would will the birth of Ben. It's a bright, benevolent one, she is sure, of wolves and sweet foals and cherry-trees.

"You don't believe it?"

"No, I don't."

"Why not? Your gods gave you so much. Is this anything more than another gift?"

"Gods don't give us what they have themselves. Only gods see what was and what is and what will be.  _ Their _ kind think otherwise, but that's to be expected."

_ You're wrong _ , she thinks, but says nothing. " _ Their _ kind," Rey repeats, still surprised that he considers them separate even now.

"Yes. They are different - surely you see that by now."

"Not especially."

"No? Where  _ I _ come from, a man does not break another man's arm for glancing over the mare he loves. We don't chase Men down for having the gall to be smelled on the air." Han gives her a look, lip curling in distaste. "He's killed for you before and he'll kill again, I can tell. Watch now, when the fires come, and another man will eye you and Kylo will fight him. And he'll win, no doubt."

"He loves me."

"I know. He won't stay here, you know." Han watches her, the red-brown of his hair blowing into his eyes. "The saltborns in the bay come together once every month, maybe two, to let the foals play and to talk to one another. The rest of their time they spend alone with their mates and their children. You won't have what you have here, or what you had at home."

"I  _ hated _ what I had at home," Rey says, a little tightly. "I wasn't allowed to do a thing and they worked me like a fucking dog."

"You know what I mean."

" _ Do _ I?"

"Your…" He picks delicately over the word. "Your  _ kind _ are used to living in great hordes. It's in your blood. It's not in his."

Since arriving on this headland, she has been called seal and  _ reunig _ and  _ reuna _ , but no one has truly treated her askance because of her origin, or spoken to her particularly because of her skin. It jolts her when Han does it.

"Have you forgotten I was reared by Men?" she half-snaps.

"Men are reared in great hordes, too." He sniffs. " _ Reunen _ and Men are more alike than you think."

Maz told her that, too, once. That feels like long ago. 

"A witch told me that once."

"She was right."

"I didn't like it when I lived with Men. I like it here, but I won't forever."

"Not forever," he agrees.

"So what is it that you want?" Rey asks of him. "From me?"

"I want my son," Han says plainly. "I want him to know me again."

"How do I do anything for that?"

Han tells her, "You can talk to him. Convince him. He'd do anything for you."

"I'm not your raven."

"I have  _ tried _ ," Han gripes, exasperated. "You don't understand the pain of these things; you aren't a mother." That jolts Rey. "I thought he was killed - and then he comes home and hardly looks at me again. You don't understand that pain. You don’t understand how it hurts to have your own child hate you like that.”

“No doubt you don’t understand how it hurts for your father to be ashamed of you.”

“Have you a father,  _ reunig _ ?”

Rey stiffens and turns her face away. “I did,” she says tightly. “He died.”

“Was he of Men, as well?”

“Fathers are fathers and mothers are mothers no matter what they are.”

"Think of it so if you will."

"My father wasn't ashamed of me. He knew what I was and he protected me until he died. That's what fathers  _ ought  _ to do."

"I  _ know _ what fathers  _ ought _ to do. I've said - I  _ knew _ I should never have done what I did the moment I did them. But Kylo - he just won't give me the chance to mend it."

"I won't ask him to speak to you." Rey gets to her feet, and Han watches as she rises. "You do that yourself."

"And he'll turn me away, no doubt."

"Maybe. He might not. But  _ don't _ do it in front of Ben. Don't bring him into it. God knows you've done enough dragging children into your grown messes."

She is gone before he can answer, walking against the pull of the sea and towards the deeper wood, though the wild water behind her seems to call her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **IRISH TRANSLATIONS ******
> 
> ******_Ronín _\- female seal/selkie  
>  _Capall-uisce _\- water-horse/kelpie  
>  _Fearrón _\- male selkie______ **
> 
> ****______**GAULISH TRANSLATIONS ******_ _ _ _ _ _ ** **
> 
> ********______****_Ebeul _\- foal  
>  _Caden _\- fuck, shit, bullshit, bad, foul, etc  
>  _mammig _\- mama/mother  
>  _Tadig _\- father/papa________ ** ** _ _ _ _ _ _
> 
> ****______****_________Mamm-gozh _\- grandma/grandmother  
>  _Tad-gozh _\- grandpa/grandfather____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ** ** _ _ _ _ _ _ ** **
> 
> ****______****____________In all seriousness, I KNOW I've left this months. Both my grandparents are ill, one terminally, and so my and my family's lives have been put on hold for a long time. This has been going on since June, but recent developments and the end of my class schedule have allowed me to have a lot more time to write in the last few days._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ** ** _ _ _ _ _ _ ** **
> 
> ****______****____________Also, my Twitter's @arkanisren now, and private, because y'all are fuckin nutcases lmao_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ** ** _ _ _ _ _ _ ** **


	6. Bad News, But Good News Also

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which I explain a lot.

Hey guys - sorry for the hiatus (again).

(SIDE NOTE: A few people asked if I was discontinuing this fic entirely - no way! I'm just explaining the situation. I'm working on editing Ch. 6 right now!)

My grandfather passed away last Monday and was buried on Friday. He was 91, had been extremely ill for a long time, and wasn't expected to live to see 2020. It was still an enormous shock, as all deaths are, and left my family heartbroken, especially so close to the Christmas season.

I had _Chapter 6: Winter Song_ already written at the time and so spent the days after the funeral editing it, to have something to do. (It's currently at 11,238 words. I'll post at roughly 13,000)

Someone at the funeral's afters mentioned to me that Grandad wrote a book about the woodlands of our county in his late fifties, but had never published it or even had it looked over by publishers. No one is sure where the draft is, as it was written by hand nearly 40 years ago, but it got me thinking. 

This evening, before I sat and posted this, I drew up plans to start drafting Salt in the Blood as an original work. 

I guess it's because I've always wanted to, and because I would hate for something to happen to me and for my work to be lost. I keep my writing and illustration mostly hidden from my family because I consider them private things. If something happened to me, my unfinished work would likely never be read again. 

Sounds kind of egotistical, which I guess it is, but I suppose that's the point of this too-long note. SITB is the longest and most well-received thing I've ever written. It was always _original_ in a way; a way of testing the waters of native myth with a medium (Reylo) that was palatable at the time, and still is. 

It'll be an entire rewrite; story will be essentially the same, but I will definitely add and remove certain aspects as I see fit. I may write it to be darker, more gritty, but with more focus on the wonders of the mythological and of the love that binds the story together. I haven't decided yet.

Two things I _have_ decided on: Raghnailt and Kaero. Raghnailt is Old Irish for the Norse female name _Ragnhilde_. Such names would have been common, especially in Norse-influenced areas like the one in SITB. 

Kaero is a compound name from both Breton and Gaulish; _Kaezal,_ the beast, and _Karo_ , the beloved. You can see where I'm going with this one.

I think an artbook is in order, too. I'll cross that particular bridge when I come to it.

Quick side note: I deactivated my Twitter. I'm refusing to acknowledge TROS, because I think the creators were desperate to pander to everyone. I'll continue writing fic regardless. You can still hit me up @hagenshall on Tumblr.

Thanks for reading (and for your patience). Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas - agus Nollaig Shona Duit _._

_xoxo_

  
  
  
  
  
  



	7. Flesh of My Flesh, Bone of My Bone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey is dealt a series of revelations, both intentional and not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Beneath the sky you'll stand alone / Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone. _- **from 'Wexford Lullaby'** by unknown, a 19th century lullaby from the south-east of Ireland.__
> 
> _  
> _Hi buds :) It's been a while, I know. Most of you know my grandfather passed away in December, and since then everything's been a lot. I went back to uni and have been sorting a Move Out, but now I think I've wrangled an actual posting schedule, not just the nice idea of one. I've spent this week writing so much; this, Mountain of the Moon (sexy), Sniper!Ben au (sexy), and Mafia au (sexy, dangerous). Maybe I'm getting my mojo back, lads._  
> _
> 
> _  
> _This chapter was 20k, and it was too fucking much to load on one chapter in one go, so have 10k of Shit Going Down. BIG TW/CW for blood and violence. Some pretty fucking gnarly shit in this one, but mostly at the end._  
> _
> 
> _  
> _anyway, again. No idea how to format links._  
> _
> 
> _  
> _Link to SITB Master-playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7rmWZIQeU2otAuwPnBDbrA?si=wFiKucKkRh6aiwI2wJvlcQ_  
> _
> 
> _  
> _Newish Land's End playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4fwtcao0ov90eSCqIeqoxz?si=CZKE9Ld_R6O8jZLgaxYq6Q__  
> 

The _rónín_ will struggle to understand him at first.

The _each-uisce_ is so different to her. She has never seen someone so big in all her life. He's very different to the stout _fearrón_ ; the _each-uisce_ is a giant, eyes soft and deep, shoulders as broad as the stretch of rock hiding the bay away from the rest of the sea. When he is a man his eyes are brown - or blue or green - and when he is in the water they are gold - or silver, or bronze. When he is in the water he lets her touch the bare and scattered scales on his shoulders, his arms, his neck, and under her fingertips she finds them as smooth and as beautiful as a salmon’s back.

His tongue is harsher than hers, heavier. It will take time for her to attune herself to the _each-uisce_ ’s words. He is only very gentle and very soft to her, even when he is silent.

The beast adores his new mate. He is eager, _insisting_ on nuzzles and little kisses and pets, insisting on bringing armful after armful of beautiful things to her. He spends hours and days boring holes in the cloudy blue belly of mussel-shells, stringing them up all together so that she can wear them - or simply shake them, if she likes, and make them _clack_ together. He fights a snarling merrow for a chunk of sunstone so clear it seems, in some light, to be entirely nonexistent, and brings that to her, too. When she sees his scratched cheek - merrow flail and claw - she makes a soft sound, and pokes at it, as if there is something she would do, but won’t.

The first time he makes to kiss her, entirely softly, she slaps him so hard she splits his lip, and disappears back into the deep. Once the _rónín_ realises that he is sorry, and willing to take the slaps for kisses, she stays the slapping, and lets him do as he will.

Often - every day - he offers to kill the _fearrón,_ the seal of the rock that the selkie ran from. It would be nothing, he insists, and makes sure to stretch very purposely so that she can see the power in his arms, his chest. She always tells him no, even as her eyes flash with churlish vengeance, and so he will ask again the next day; it is only right of him, as her mate.

Indeed the _each-uisce_ thinks of himself as her mate, though they have not lain together. When they finally do, and she is ready, he thinks of himself as her mate even more. He sits her in his lap their first time, for her comfort - it would not do to panic her with the weight of his body. She puts the weight of herself on him, face against his shoulder, and he lets her discover the pace she enjoys the most. He encourages this, encourages her enjoyment - it is something he will do until he drops dead - but this is one of the last times she will sit atop of him for very long as they make love; his sensibilities are insulted by the idea that his new mate would have to seek her own pleasure while he is present and able.

The _rónín_ knows this, and delights in it - or she will, once they are finished, once she has finished her soft panting and fruitless pawing at his back, once she is limp and happy on the sand, half-asleep, once her new mate has put himself about her to keep her warm. 

She delights in the knowledge that he will give her so much more to delight in.

\--------------------------------

  
  


Ben is where Rey left him to go with Han, playing in the shallows. He flies at her when he spots her, sodden and eager in his calf-length britches, and exclaims, "Rey!" as if he has not seen her in days. 

"You're soaked!' He jumps at her; she catches him, hefts him into her arms. Ben clasps his little hands about her neck. There's riverweed on his shoulders, and he smells of soft water. “You smell all rivery, too.”

“I like how the river smells. It smells like green. But the sea smells like blue.”

Rey wonders about that, and decides the child is right. The river smells of the trees all about it, the heavy earth and the heat. The sea just smells of sky and sun and salt.

_And blood._

“Where did you go with _tad-gozh_?” the child asks.

“Oh, just nowhere.”

His wet hair dripping all down her dress, he whispers, " _Mamm-gozh_ and _tadig_ were snapping."

Rey stills. "When?"

"Before you came back. I didn't tell them you went with _tad-gozh_ , in case _tadig_ didn't like it."

"Where have they gone?"

"Into the trees," he sulks, and pushes drenched curls out of his eyes. "They didn't want me to hear."

_Thank fuck_. "Good boy. They were probably talking about boring things. Go on and play and I'll find you in a while." 

"Don't take long," the sodden foal insists.

"I won't _, a stór_."

She lets him down. She is more relieved than she should be that the child stayed silent about her conversation with Han; Kylo is not a foul man given to fits of jealous or spiteful temper - both Rey and Ben know this - but Han is a veritable spark to that particular kindling. It is something Rey would rather avoid, though she now knows why the rift exists, by Han's very admission.

She watches Ben go and wonders quite passionately how anyone could bring themselves to beat a child - let alone one's own child. She bristles a little. She feels that she should have been harsher with Han, and resolves to be cold to him when next they speak.

“Seal-mare,” she hears. “Come here to me.”

Mon Mothma is sitting up, alone in her bed of furs - though when Rey looks, she can see several streamborns keeping careful watch from afar. Some foal’s pet stoat has made a bed in her lap, and she holds it gently in her ancient hands.

Rey goes. She goes to her and kneels, then crosses her legs under her. The stoat crawls up Mothma’s sleeve and emerges at her collar.

“Why do you call me that?” Rey asks. The old mare reaches out for her hands, and so Rey must give them. Mothma’s hands are as cold as the river, still.

“What else am I to call you? I won’t call you _ebeul,_ because you aren’t a child, and you aren’t all whole.”

Rey rathers thinks she has misheard her, and if she hasn’t, she is very nearly quite used to old women saying things that make no sense. “I don’t know what you mean. I never know what you mean.”

“You will. Oh, _reunig-don-diabarzh,_ you will.” She squeezes her hands hard, as if she is trying to squeeze the warmth from Rey’s palms. “Has your man ever told you the story of how his kind - _our_ kind - came to be?”

The stoat settles on Mothma’s shoulder and seems to sleep. Rey says, “Well - a little. Most of it was told to me by a witch.”

“Tell me what you know.”

“She said that Epona was a horse-herder-of-Men that wanted to cross the sea. She cut her hair and threw it in the sea and prayed for to be able to breathe in the water, but she threw horsehair in, too, and became - became this.”

Mothma smiles. Her eyes have closed, and Rey would think she was asleep only for the tight grip of her hands. “Clever little story for so much wrong with it.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

Mothma opens her eyes. “In a way,” she muses. The stoat stares at Rey, and then climbs down into Mothma’s lap again. “It is true, in a way. But that is not how we came to be, _kazeg-reun._ ”

“Then how?”

“Do you know of the Moon Mare?”

Mon Mothma mentioned the Moon Mare before, mentioned she had dreamt of her. “Was Epona the Moon Mare?”

“No. Epona is our river mother, sea mother - mother to those with manes of water. The Moon Mare is the mother of us all - the Sun Stallion is our father - and they are of stars and light.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When the sky was born, the Moon Mare made it bright. She raced across the black every night, so fast that her hooves kicked up stars all across the sky. By day, she slept. The Sun Stallion made the day bright, and he galloped so hard that his hooves kicked up the clouds. They never met properly, but he saw her from afar at sunset when he was falling into his slumber, and she saw him when the sun rose and she was not yet asleep.”

Rey imagines them; a white mare, dappled grey like the moon, black-eyed like the night sky - a red stallion, mane yellow as the sun, blue eyes like searing summer. She has seen horses like that before, wandering, ridden, and remembers the white mare in the town that Kylo liked so well.

“The Sun Stallion tried to court her. He threw flaming clouds across the dying sky to please her, slept early so that she could wake a longer night, tried to reach her. She kicked him the first time, bit him the second, and told him on the third that she would never love someone she could never meet, never touch.” Mon Mothma points towards the sky. “She loved him dearly, though, and he her. When their skies were one, in midsummer or midwinter, he loved her so quickly that he rushed to bring her gifts she could hold. The only thing he could find so quickly were red stars, like blooms in the sky. He surrounded her with them, these stars, as red as blood, and when she told him she would accept him, they were one, and the sun and the moon bloomed red. Their children - our kind - were sun-and-moon, and so they brought them to the earth where they could live under sun and moon both. Sometimes the sun and moon bloom red, still, and we know they are still looking down upon us.” 

Mothma lets go of her hands. “Epona was blood of their blood, bone of their bone, children of their children. She was the Mother Under The Sky. We could not always swim. Epona wished to cross the Long Water to the Western Lands, to bring her herd with her, and cried because she couldn’t swim so far, not even in her woman-skin. She prayed and prayed and prayed, and eventually her Mother granted her wish, and pulled at the tides to make them bend to her will, pulled at Epona to make her ready for water.” To Rey’s surprise, six sharply-lined gills open up on Mothma’s throat, and the threat of river-green scale blooms under the fabric of her shift. “This is how we were made ready.”

Rey touches her own neck. Mothma inhales sharply, and the gills are gone into faint lines.

“-and Men?” Rey asks.

Mothma considers that a moment. She picks up the stoat, looks at it while it scrabbles, then lets it go. It darts away from them. “Deer were put on this earth to feed Men,” she tells Rey. “Rabbits. Hares. Cows. Goats. Is this not so?”

“Yes,” Rey breathes.

“Men were put on this earth to feed _us._ ”

Rey wonders if she would feel a little ill hearing that, but doesn’t. It feels simple, true. She sits and waits. Her heart flutters a little.

“My kind?” she dares.

“I wondered when you would ask me. Why do you want to know?”

“Because I have to.”

“What will happen if you do not know?”

“Tell me,” Rey insists, a little heated, and then, softer: “Please.”

Mon Mothma watches her for a long time, gaze imperceptible only for the threat of a smile at the corners of her mouth.

“I am thirsty. Bring me a drink.” She proffers a cup at Rey.

Rey fills it at the river and scrambles back up the bank, careful not to slop it over the sides. Mothma drinks half of it in one go, leans back, and starts speaking before Rey has even sat herself down again.

“You were the same, once. Long ago - all the world was white. Long before Epona took her herds to the sea. Silly colts went to the water’s edge before they could swim, and they fell in. They were saved from drowning by a horde of _reunen -_ only beasts.” Mothma sips at the cup. Idly, Rey notes that a rearing horse has been etched into the wooden base of it. “The _reunen_ were so glad for friends that they offered them sealskins so that they would never fear drowning again. The colts used their horseskins less and less, until they no longer could. They weren’t horses, then, but seal-people - like you.”

Rey doesn’t say anything for a moment. _I came - from them_? Mothma says, “You have few words now for someone with so many questions before.”

“I don’t know what to say,” she tells her truthfully, and then, a little bitterly: “Every time I go near you, you tell me something enormous.”

“This isn't enormous, _reunig-don-diabarzh_. The truth is never enormous.”

“So what _is_ the truth?” Rey asks. “We were the same once - my kind and yours?”

“Yes. The same way that streamborns became what they are, so did your kind become what you are. The same Mother that birthed your kind birthed ours. Go softly on him, on your man, when you poke at differences, and know that you were once the same. Go, now. I would be alone.”

Rey gets up to go. The sun has fallen a little, and the moon is just visible in the bluing sky. _Is she there?_ Rey thinks. _The Mother?_

Mothma is asleep in her furs when Rey turns back to ask.

\---------------------

She avoids Han for the next coming days, making time for Kylo and Ben. Leia looks, several times, as if she would say something to her, and then stops. Kylo is a little cold to his mother, and in turn spends his time with his mate and child. Rey means to ask what is wrong, but doesn't. It feels intrusive.

Kylo throws himself into making her a beautiful spear with a shaft of sturdy ash and a fire-blackened head, as sharp and as deadly as she could ever wish for.

What wonderful craftsmen a herd of _each-uisce_ could be, she thinks, if they took a notion to be them. 

She sits by him for several nights as he makes it, watching him scrape the bark from the green wood and then sharpen the point over the heat of an open flame. Rey watches the firelight in the focus of his dark eyes, and the bright sparks lifting up into the black sky.

He takes time to etch a tiny horse into its shaft, a miniscule seal, a mass of miniature swirls she takes to be the sea. Ben insists on etching in his own little shapes into it - a rudimentary wolf and a little scene of the fish in the river - and gives his father twine dyed pond-green to wrap about its middle.

"Like your spear from home," Kylo murmurs, tapping the freshly-carved fish on the wood. "Do you remember? That stung like a bastard when you jabbed me with it."

Rey does remember the _píce-iasc,_ and how she stabbed him in the ribs like Christ on the cross, but laughs now. "I do, yes. Some of the men had two blades on theirs, one at each end."

Kylo applies the same method to the other end, and Rey's spear is complete by morning. Ben pleads to paint it - he tells her his own little foal's spear was chewed to bits by his wolves, and he has not yet made another.

"Just the fish," he bargains, hanging out of her hand, "and the wolf. And the horse. Please please please - and the water - _pleeeease-_ "

"You can paint it when I've tried it out first," she promises. "I don't want it to break, and then your painting will go to waste."

" _Break,"_ Kylo says incredulously. They are sitting beneath the tree they have come to think of as their own, not far from the tiny stick-and-muck longhouse, as the dawn begins to break. "That won't break unless you put it over your knee." Birds sing above them. The dawning sky looks clear and bright, yellowy on the horizon.

Ben reminds him curtly, "I want one too, please, _tadig_."

"I'll make you one, don't worry. Let me wash the black off my hands first. You ought to be learning how to do it yourself soon, too."

“You _show_ me, then,” the little boy demands, and Kylo’s laugh is like the sun.

Rey leaves them to work and play, kissing both their cheeks. She takes her spear to the river and stands there, at the top of a tiny fall, unsure. Rose was always the hunter, land or river, and could even pluck a fish out by hand if she was quick enough. Rey simply led her to them. Rey could only scavenge. She flexes her fingers around the spear and waits. The river flows cold and clear around her ankles.

She thinks about Rose for a moment. She wonders what she's doing; hunting, maybe, trawling through the brush after a deer, or skinning her quarry on a sheet of oilskin by her stone hut. She wonders if perhaps she has taken her eye to a northman - if _any_ of the women have. 

She thinks about Finn, then, and if he takes northmen out in his boat, mingled amongst the Gael men, to hunt for sharks. She is sure they bemoan the loss of their prize Gaul. She thinks about Phasma, and wonders if she matchmakes between the Gael girls and the Norse men. 

_Not long. Not far._

Wildly, she stabs into the water at the first fish she sees, and when she lifts the spear out of the water she stares in amazement at the trout thrashing at the end of it. She dislodges it with a crunch, heaves it at the riverbank - it flops and jumps until it dies - and spears four more. 

She cannot contain the giggle that bursts free from her mouth. It is all so easy, here - she can scarcely imagine how it would be at home; shivering and blue-fingered in an icy stream, wary for wolves, wary for village men coming to bellow at her for fishing, wary for brigands come to steal it from her. 

They are fat and shimmering trout, all four, all with a side-wound washed clean by the rushing water. She gives them to a pack of curious children that have been watching, fascinated with the joy of the selkie-come-inland and how she squalls over fish. Beyond them, Mon Mothma is telling stories to a crowd of awestruck streamborns. Ben and Kylo are where she left them, comparing ash rods of different lengths.

Rey stands on her rock a moment, watching.

"Rey!" someone calls.

It takes her by surprise - she nearly falls in - and when she turns she sees Enfys, lounging on the other side of the riverbank with five or six others. 

"Come come come - look at what we found!"

She goes to them, walking right through the river. Enfys is there, with Cassian and Jyn. Jessika and Kaydel lounge beside them, and Enfys is sitting with a man that Rey does not know. She sits in the space they make for her. Enfys snatches her hand and holds something above it; a delicate silver chain, several of its link brown with blood.

“Look. Gems from Men. Got it this morning.” Enfys lets it trickle into her palm as if it is a handful of pale water. “You can have it - I don’t much like the whitish ones.”

“It’s silver,” Rey supplies helpfully. “It’s not really a gem, but it’s pretty all the same.” She pockets it even so, scratching the blood off with a fingernail.

She looks properly at the man she doesn’t recognise; he’s big, like the rest, and his skin is dark and golding like he has lived his years under a heavier sun than the one Rey knows. His eyes are very green. Where he lies on his side Enfys leans up into him, elbows on his ribs. 

“This is Yannic,” Enfys says, seeing her curiosity. “He’s like us.”

“Like _you_ ,” Cassian corrects, but it is in jest, and they all chuckle. 

Enfys tells the newcomer, “This is Rey. She’s _reuna_.”

“I can tell,” he says, and smiles. 

It is comforting to sit with them and listen to their talk. They are almost like Men; joking and gossiping, jeering one another and sharing stories. Cassian leaves for a moment and returns with an armful of apples, and they share them as they lounge there. Rey nibbles at her apple, relaxed, though her mind is Mothma and the _reunen,_ the saviour-seals.

  
  


"The one with the red hair,” she hears Yannic saying. “I reckon I'll have her when we go."

"You can't _reckon_ you'll have anyone," Enfys argues back. "They have to _reckon_ they want _you_ as well."

"I _know_ that, fool. There's not been anyone yet that hasn't, though." The others laugh at this, knowing.

“Go where?” Rey asks delicately.

They look over her, surprised. “The edge of the wood,” Enfys tells her, “at the half-moon, by the dunes. _Samanios_. Didn’t anyone say?”

She repeats, tentatively, “Sa - Samanios?” It’s a strange word, one she feels she almost knows. 

“It’s a bit like....” Jessika trails off, in the way one does when trying to put into words something that has never before needed elaboration. “A bit like the way Men light the fires when they pull their wheat. We see them over the mountains, when it gets warm.”

_Like Samhain_ , Rey thinks, and then feels a fool. 

"That streamborn, the one with all the freckles," Enfys went on, peering down at the other side of the riverbank where the streamborns congregate; the others crane their necks to see, too. "I don't _reckon_ , unlike some people, but just look at him. I could have him if I wanted. I wonder if he likes getting fucked by saltborns."

“Everyone likes getting fucked,” Kaydel says matter-of-factly, and the others nod and murmur their agreement. “Even better if your gods _like_ you to like getting fucked.”

Cassian stretches, leaning away from Jyn. "Even streamborns want to be fucked." He casts a meaningful glance over at Damaz and Ilsa, resting peacefully together in the shade of an oak.

Yannic turns his golden gaze on Rey. "And the _reungwerin_?" he asks; a question. Rey stares at him.

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she says, face pinkening.

Jyn asks her, "Didn't you know? Didn't Kylo say?"

_He certainly didn't say - he didn't say a fucking word!_ "Know what?"

They exchange glances. "At Samanios, at the half-moon," Enfys explains, "it's almost like - what's the word for it? An offering. And so, because it's an offering, you-"

Yannic interrupts, bluntly, "You fuck under the moon at Samanios. The Mother and Father smile on that kind of thing."

_Jesus_. She feels a little cold, like the icy run of the beginning of anger. "Fuck off - _I_ was telling her," Enfys argues, and he responds with a near-sexual show of teeth that Enfys smiles at despite herself.

_Why didn’t he say, why didn’t he tell me?_ she wonders. _Just a word, just a mention - is he hiding it from me, that utter knob-_

"You don't _have_ to," Jyn placates Rey. "You really didn't know?"

"No, I - I had no idea."

"You'll like it plenty," dark Yannic tells her. "We've never had a _reunig_ there before." 

“Tell me about it,” she implores them, and they do. 

  
  
  
  


\---------------------------

  
  


She seeks him out, after. The sun has pushed over to the other end of the sky. Her head is full of it - mother-mares and moons and ink under the skin - but she idly notes how enjoyable it was, lying in the sun with those that almost seem her own age. She would have had Kylo there to make it perfect, but she is angry with him, and does not intend to think things through.

Rey asks a group of foals if they have seen him, and they point her towards the edge of the river, down by the shade of a leaning beech. Up along the water, she sees Ben, carried on his grandfather’s shoulders while the wolves bark about him, and slips out of sight. She makes her way quickly across the higher bank that leads down to the shaded run.

It will never be lost on Rey quite how beautiful he is, no matter how enraged with him she becomes; she is quite sure that she could never blame anyone that fell into his hungered grasp. He looks a strange god, sloe-eyed and giant, focused intently on a little spear half the size of her own. In the moment before she makes herself known to him, she gazes over the love she is sure he puts into it; the same love he put into hers before it. It is a spear for his son, his only son, so precious to him that he brings himself away alone to make it. 

The knife he uses is smoky-but-clear, wrapped in sinew, and with it he shaves great curls of white wood from the unbarked stick. One of the wolves lies near him - the old grey one, too tired to go racing after her kin - and she huffs at Rey when she comes near. Kylo moves as if to greet Rey, kiss her, but sees the set of her face and goes carefully back to what he is doing.

_He knows. That absolute awful thing, he_ **_knows_ **.

"Hey," Rey says. "Look at me." At her tone, Kylo frowns, and lifts his head.

" _Samanios_ ," she says - one word - and his dark eyes roll and rise to heaven. "Don't roll your eyes at me."

"Don't start, Rey."

"Start what - I - _what_ ? Enfys said you all go together and you all - you all _lie_ together?"

He presses his forehead against the staff like a wife-weary sharker and sighs. That inflames Rey with bitter anger; she isn’t a fishwife, she isn’t nagging - _if he huffs at me like that again, I’ll smack him._

“I wasn’t going to tell you at all. I was going to keep you away from it.”

“But _why_?” she demands. “I’m not a child, Kylo, as much as you treat me like one. I can cope.”

Kylo raises his head and gives her a dark, warning look. She ignores it, and snaps, "Don’t you scowl at me. You ought to have told me.”

“Yes, and then what? Now that you know - now what?”

She goes pink. “Well - _I_ don’t know."

“There you are, then,” Kylo says stubbornly, and goes back to his stick and blade.

Rey orders, "Don't be foul. I'm not a baby!"

He doesn’t look at her now. "No, but I know you'd hate it, and that's why I said nothing."

Rey stands there a moment, watching him shear flakes from the point of the branch. She says, lowly, "What makes you think I would hate it?"

Kylo does not stop what he is doing, but his jaw goes taut.

" _Kylo_." She is a wolf with its jaws around a stag's flank; stubborn, dragging. 

Exasperated, he asks, "What do you mean by that?" 

"What I say. Why do you think I would hate it?"

He bristles and says nothing. Rey wants to snatch the stick from his hand and snap it over her knee. She leans forward and tells him, "I am _not_ a child."

"I don't give a fuck."

"You should," she snaps. "You _should_ give a fuck, because I'm _not_ a child and you are _not_ going to coddle me forever - I won't have it. I _won't_!"

The grey she-wolf, agitated at the sharpness of their exchange, lurches to her feet. She puts her head over Rey's shoulder and tries furiously to lick the inside of her mouth. Rey holds her great head at arm's length and tells Kylo, "You won't hide me away from this. You won't, I won't let you!"

He orders the wolf away, even snaps at her with bare teeth, but he is not her master, and she gives them six feet of space before she starts up grizzling again.

Rey stares at him for a moment. The air feels thick. "Is it … because I'm not - because I'm not like you?"

He casts the stick aside, gets to his feet, and draws himself up in abject offense, chest swelling. 

"Stop this now," he demands, fury behind his eyes.

" _Is_ it?" Rey exclaims. They face one another, nose-to chest, and she can feel the red rage shaking off his skin.

"You _know_ it isn't - now stop."

"Or what?" she challenges him. They are dangerously close to fighting, to breaking the promise she made him make and made to him in turn. 

"No one is putting their hands on you," he tells her, eyes bright and wild, and he is bristling with fury. "No one."

"Fuck you," Rey snaps, " _fuck_ you - do you really think that's what I want? Someone else?"

"Then what _do_ you want?" he bellows.

Stung, Rey shoves him. "Don't you fucking shout at me, don't you _dare_ , you horrible awful-"

He catches hold of her wrists and bites, "You're impossible to talk to - do you know that?"

" _Don't_ talk to me then. Get your fucking hands off me, you horrible thing," she says, voice cracking, eyes stinging, and pulls away from him. She is gone before he can even think to chase her. She hears him come after her for a long stretch, and then he curses and spits and lets her go. She would only outrun him.

It’s easy to run here. She supposes the woods at home are tightly knotted, trees close together like lovers, and only wolves and wildcats can dart and run wild without hurt. There are great long stretches of wild grass here, fallen trees that she can run up and leap from. 

She finds the strange little glade he fucked her in, properly, and sits where they sat, lies where they lay, puts her face in her hands, and _cries._

_Fucker fucker fucker fucker - fucking fool idiot fucker I hate him I’m not a baby I can do what I want I want to see these things fucker fucker fucker fucker-_

She thinks of what else he has hidden, what else he feels, what else, what else-

“Rey?”

Rey jumps. 

Ilsa is peering over her, cupping her swollen belly as if it is like to drop off her. “You’re all teary! -are you alright?” she asks. 

“Yes,” Rey whimpers.

“Why are you crying?”

Rey wipes her eyes harshly with her sleeve and sniffs hard. “I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.” Ilsa looks about her, stands straight, and smiles softly. “Did you snap with Kylo?”

Rey doesn’t answer. Ilsa says, “-ah. Come on, come with me,” - and tries to help her up. Rey does not budge.

"Come on. It's alright."

She bursts into tears again, and Ilsa hushes her like a child. 

"No," Rey sobs. "No, I'm fine."

Ilsa takes her by the shoulders and says, gently, "I have a mate, too. I know what happens when one of us gets angry. Come on, it's fine."

Rey lets the woman take her wherever she is taking her, insisting along the way that she’s perfectly fine and wasn’t crying, not even once.

“We all snap with our mates, you know,” Ilsa tells her, linking their arms quite as if they are fierce-friends in the hamlet. “Even streamborns.”

“We didn’t - God, I don't even know what that _means-_ "

“Fought, then. You fought.”

“No,” Rey insists. “We just ... bickered.”

“Fine, then - you _bickered_. We all bicker, even us. Here, look. We’ll sit here.”

They have only walked as far as the babbling little stream. Ilsa sits her at the edge of a wide tree and lets her cry, sniffle, huff like a child. “He fucking - he wouldn’t even _tell_ me!” Rey blubbers. “Nothing! Not a word! Like I was a _baby -_ and then - and then - and then-”

Ilsa listens, shushes her and tuts, pats her shoulder - like a mother. 

“He snapped at me when I asked him.”

Ilsa gives her a look. “You didn’t shout back?”

“Of course I did. I just - I’m not a _baby._ I’m not a little petal that needs looking after, and _hiding._ I’m grown, I’m nearly twenty, I can do what I like. Oh, I _hate_ him-”

“No, no, come on,” Ilsa says, rubbing her back as she snots all over the pregnant woman’s sleeve. “Come on, now. You know you don’t hate him. _Mother,_ you _reunen_ cry a lot, don’t you?”

“ _No,_ ” Rey hiccups.

“Samanios is … different. Kylo is saltborn. You’re _reunen._ He likes looking after you. In his mind, this could lead to - well, anything.”

“Like _what?_ ”

“Like _anything._ It’s a long night. It’s beautiful, but it’s new to you.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Rey bites, “does anyone in this fucking place speak in anything but fucking _riddles?_ ”

“Oh, don’t you start. Listen to me. You need to breathe, or you’ll cry yourself sick. Calm down or I’ll properly smack you. I will, Rey, I’ll do it.”

She calms eventually, sobs turning to snuffles, and Ilsa talks at her until the tears dry.

“Now, you see? Worked up over nothing. You’re as bad as a foal.”

“Great. Where _are_ your children?” Rey asks.

“Somewhere. They’re probably with Damaz. I don’t know.”

Her flagrant unknowing is strange, still. Rey could never imagine a mother from the bay at home being so flippant and carefree for her child’s whereabouts - in fact she is used to the very opposite; a child strays from sight for a moment longer than old and its mother is panicking, shrieking, too fearful of wolves and Norse and brigands to afford carelessness.

It isn’t really _carelessness_ here. 

Trying to be as delicate as possible, Rey inquires, “How many do you have?”

"Six. Seven, soon." Ilsa leans her head back against the bark, beaming. "All red, like Damaz - and _big_."

_Seven_. Even a human mother would struggle to keep sight of that many babes. Rey supposes that Ilsa has Damaz, who does as much as a mother and perhaps more. Rey rather thinks that she knows Ilsa's children by now; four boys and two girls, hair as bright and as red as flame, resplendent in their childish jewels of shell and stone. The four boys are the very spit of their square-jawed father, but the girls have Ilsa's soft face, though her black hair will be lost.

"Yours will be big, too - _if_ you have them. You're a bit short, like me, but Kylo is big like Damaz. Foals are always big if their father is, too."

She stiffens a little at the assumption. "What if they're not … foals?"

Ilsa thinks on that a moment. "I don't know. I've never seen a _mari-morgen_ before."

She has heard Kylo say that word before, pleasant in his heavy tongue - _marrrrri-morrrrgen_ \- the Gaulish word for the offspring of her kind and of his.

Rey changes the subject. "You must be tired, with the baby."

Ilsa laughs. "Not really." She shifts her weight to her other side. "Damaz doesn't let me do much. That's what all the others from the river said - they said the one good thing I did by having babes by a saltborn is that I'll never have to raise a finger while I have a baby in me."

Kylo said something similar to Rey, not long ago, deep inside her with her earlobe between his teeth.

"I hope this one is a girl," Ilsa goes on wistfully, patting her belly. "I have so many boys, and not _enough_ girls."

"How long will it be?"

"Not long now. A couple of months." Ilsa cups her belly. "I do feel _big_. But I'm used to it."

She sees Rey staring and assures her, "I don't mind it. Damaz said your kind - well, _Men_ \- are scared of having babies. The Women, at least."

"Yes, a bit."

"I'm not scared at all. I chose."

Rey raises an eyebrow. "My children," Ilsa says brightly. "I chose all my children. Not like with Men where you don't choose at all.

_She wanted all of her children - every one_. "Oh."

"Do you see what I mean? Nobody made me. I wanted to, and Damaz wanted to, and that's all that matters. I love foals, but some don't. That hurts me none. Men are hurt by things that don't hurt at all."

"How much does it hurt when you … ?" Rey lets herself trail off. "When they come?"

"Lots, but not for long. An hour, maybe two. You do forget. You heal quick. Damaz says that Women tear and die. Is that true?"

Rey grimaces. They were fortunate enough in the bay at home to be lucky with births, but she had still seen several women die, hemorrhaging, faces slick and grey like the face of Death itself. She nods.

" _Caden_ ," Ilsa says. Rey thinks for a moment that she doesn't know the Gaulish word, but realises then that she does; wrong, evil, bad, foul, sick. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do - but you know that."

“I know that _now_."

"Don't snap at Kylo. He should have told you, but saltborns are … well, they’re different. They like their mates all to themselves.”

Rey fiddles with her sleeve. _I know_. Then she rubs her eye and says, "Then he should have said."

As if she is pitying her, Ilsa tells her, "They're not like you or me. They don't think that way."

“They should.”

"They don't."

Plainly, Rey exclaims, "I want to _see_ these things. They say you see the gods under the sky. Those gods made _me_ as well, if you believe we were the same once - I want to see them. But _Kylo_ , he - he thinks-"

"No one will touch you unless you say they can. It's almost like - how do your kind say it? - an offering - yes, an offering. You give up love to all our gods, and they'll give it back. Love between mates is the strongest love of all. But you’re his mate, and you’re his _new_ mate, and it’s different.”

Rey looks at the sky again. The sun does not half-blind her like once it might have.

The mare says, quite softly, “He meant no harm by it. Even _our_ kind can be a bit funny about their first under-moon. It’s very new, and it’s lots to take in. He doesn’t want you frightened. You could be frightened if you took a mouthful of _kabell-touseg_ and it scared you, or if you thought someone wanted to kiss you, touch your hair. He’d break their legs. So would Damaz. But it’s not awful and wild like it sounds, you know. It’s lovely.”

Rey sighs. _Well done, stupid idiot fool tithead girl._ “He’ll be annoyed with me now, for giving out.”

“He won’t.” Ilsa smiles. “They never are.”

_Never,_ Rey thinks. 

\---------------------------------------

She takes her time going back. Ilsa goes ahead, nimble down the river, and Rey goes slowly to look at the setting sun and to gather her words. The river is empty of foals now, but several lanky adolescents float and play in it, splashing. 

Kylo is where she ran from him, the spear almost finished. The wolf is gone, replaced by a mound of wood shavings as high as her ankle. He does not look at her when she comes into view. Rey clears her throat. Still he will not look, wrapping the little spear in gut.

She implores him, “Don’t be angry at me.”

He looks at her, then. His face is grave. Rey sighs, fiddling with her sleeve. He’s deeply sorry, horribly guilty, but so should she be, and she _is_.

“Listen,” she begins, kneeling beside where he sits. He leans towards her as if he cannot help himself, then goes back. “I - I, uh - I think I was a bit quick to jump to thinking what I _thought_ was true.”

Kylo huffs through his nostrils like a horse, dark brows knit low and heavy.

“I’m sorry,” Rey tells him. “I should have just asked you properly. I did get a _bit_ upset.”

He says nothing, just watches, and Rey shifts where she is kneeling. "I just thought - I just - I don't know. You ought to have told me - you really should have. But _I_ shouldn't have acted like a child."

Silence. Rey reaches for his knee and touches it. “I spoke to Ilsa. She told me off. I was being silly. You should have told me, but I was being silly.”

He raises one brow.

“Talk to me now or I’m going to take that stick off you,” Rey whines.

Kylo presses his lips together. “Don’t you dare,” Rey tells him, and he snorts. “Kylo. Do not laugh at me. Hey!”

He outright chuckles, throwing his head back. “You!” he exclaims. “You, apologise! Fuck me if I’d ever see the day.”

“Don’t laugh!”

“I’m not - I’m not. Come here. No, don’t run off again. Don’t,” he insists, when she stands, and pulls her bodily onto his lap. Her shift slips at the shoulder and he grazes her bare skin with his teeth, grumbling.

" _You_ don't," Rey mumbles.

"Give me a kiss - please. I don't want to fight with you anymore."

“No,” she says, and kisses him. 

She thinks that she hears him call her a damnable bitch in Gaulish, but ignores it. Then, he pulls his face back and says, “I should have told you.”

“Yes, you should have,” Rey agrees, nose to his. He huffs hot breath at her.

“I just-” He breaks off, uncomfortable and unable to word it. “I-”

“I know.” She pokes him. “You didn’t want anyone else getting their hands on me. Horrible beast.” When she looks up at him, grinning, the high apples of his cheeks are indignantly pink. “Don’t look at me like that. You know I’m right.”

He huffs, “Not just that.”

“I’ll be fine, you know. If you’re with me.”

“I will be,” he promises fiercely, suddenly and abruptly passionate. “Forever.”

“You take me, then, at Samanios. I want to go. You take me and you look after me.”

He growls in her ear, nips at it, and then they are kissing wildly, until Kylo blurts, “Ben!”

Rey shoots up, disheveled. Ben lingers by the tree, tentative. He looks at them both with those strange grey eyes for a long moment before he speaks. 

“Were you snapping?”

“Yes, but it’s alright now,” Rey tells him. He makes his way over to sit between them, wedging himself right into their sides. “Isn’t it, Kylo?”

He clears his throat. “Yes. Rey was just being silly.”

Ben giggles and puts his head on Rey’s shoulder. “Rey’s never silly.”

“No?” Kylo picks a leaf from the child’s hair and sets it fluttering down to the ground like a moth. “Maybe you’re right, _ebeul_.”

The boy does not stop looking between them. Rey imagines that he is tasting the air, like a serpent, forked tongue flickering. Ever the peacemaker, he insists, "Let's go to the sea, _tadig_."

“So late?” Kylo asks, bending to kiss the top of his son’s head. “I thought you’d be tired.”

“Just a bit,” Ben says, leaning on him.

“We’ll go tomorrow, then, won’t we, Rey.”

“Yes, we’ll go tomorrow, and you can show me how to spear fish properly.”

“Yes!” he exclaims, and claps his hands and squeals when Kylo gives him his little spear, wrapped in gut and sharpened at both ends like Rey’s. He spars playfully with his father, who uses Rey’s spear, and when the sun is almost set he tells them both he _is_ tired, and wants to sleep. They go back to the clearing, Ben half-asleep in Kylo’s arms.

The several fires are lit, people murmuring around them, laughing softly in the night. Most of the foals are asleep. 

Ben does not wake when they put him into his furs. Rey drapes her sheepskin over him, kisses him goodnight. She sparks a little fire and then sits between Kylo’s legs while he combs through her hair with his fingers. “Pretty,” he murmurs in her ear, belly to her back.

She blinks softly at the flames. “Mm.”

“Tired?”

“Very. You?”

“Very,” he echoes, leaning his chin onto her shoulder and letting her hair free. “I’d take you away and fuck you otherwise.”

Rey laughs, rolling away from him. “You dog.”

He goes after her, and they roll in the understory, nipping softly. “Tell me you love me,” he demands, pulling up to look at her.

“You make me.”

“No, tell me.”

“I love you.”

“Good. I love you as well.” He bends and plants an exaggerated kiss on her forehead - _mwah!_ “Don’t fight me like that anymore, you must promise.”

“Maybe,” she allows. “Maybe, I might just.”

\------------------------

Ben wakes them early the next morning, insistent that they go to the sea, and so they do. He plays at being their little leader, and so they follow him as he goes, spear in hand, wolves afoot. Rey races Kylo and wins, though he catches her often and sends her sprawling, and so in revenge she makes him carry her on his back all the way to the edge of the world. She watches as the ground turns from forest floor to coarse marram to sand so soft and so deep that Kylo is able to throw her onto it.

Ben bolts down the beach, calling them both to come, and so they do this, too. It is always a sight; most children she knows run at the sea and then hesitate, or overestimate themselves and shriek at the cold of the water when it crashes into them. Ben dives straight in, sharp and sure as an arrow, and she follows him, and Kylo follows her.

She has missed the back-and-forth of salted sea, foam white as lambswool, and when she reaches it she pushes herself in entirely, soaking herself in the cold grey-blue. Ben follows where she goes, darting beneath her. His breath of bubbles floats up to her, and when she looks down in the water at him he smiles, half-hidden in the dark kelp of the shifting shallows, sea-teeth like little blades in his mouth. 

“I used to be _cold_ in this,” she exclaims. “Not long ago, either! I’ll get myself a new - what do you call them? - a _foulinenn?_ ”

“ _Foulinenn,_ that’s it. You sound like a Gaul.”

“I pick it up quick, don’t I?”

Ben goes to Rey, darting across the shifting surface to cling to her. “Can I have your black one?”

“You can have as many as you like.”

“Oh please! Red one, like a fox - and you get one, too.”

“Mother above, you pair are worse for _foulinenn_ than Men,” Kylo laughs, and gives them both a splash. 

“I like them, _tadig,_ ” Ben insists, little gills flaring. “The pups like them, too.”

“Oh, I bet they do. We’ll get them little boots, too, one for every paw,” Kylo declares, and though it is but jest Rey laughs at the idea, squeezing Ben.

“That’d be a sight, wouldn’t it?”

Ben goes still a minute, looking down at the surface of the water. His little noses twitches as he sniffs. Rey looks at him, his great silvery eyes focusing on the deep.

"What is it?" Kylo asks. 

"Nothing," he says, but does not seem sure. He clasps his hands about Kylo's neck, then, and clings close. "Can _I_ have new boots, _tadig_?”

"New boots!” Kylo exclaims, and Ben squeals with laughter.

They rest on the sand. Kylo holds handfuls of shells for Ben, lets Rey braid his hair. Rey asks him, "Will you get me some apples?"

"Now?"

“Oh, yes,” she whines, and Kylo laughs. “Lots of them. Playing is hard work, you know.”

“Oh, I know.” He sets the shells down and rises. "Stay here, then."

She lies in the sand and watches him go up the dune and into the trees. She turns, then, and looks at the sky. Ben clacks his shells, and she yawns.

"are you tired?" the child asks, curious.

"Yes! - aren't you?"

"No," he boasts, "hardly ever. Only at night."

Rey smiles, stretches. She keeps stretching until she is sure any knots are released, starting with her arms and finishing by leaning forward to touch her toes. Ben plays with a shell, patting it full of sand and then gently upending it so that the sand within takes the shell’s shape.

She sees him before Ben does.

Her breath catches in her throat like a hand around it. She does not move, does not speak, does not look at Ben.

He has long, dark wet ringlets that shimmer slick and glossy, even under the dullness of the clouded sun. Over his puck lower lip, Rey sees the barest tips of two formidable white dogteeth, jutting just ever-so-slightly. He’s up to his shoulders in the sea.

Rey's first thought is _how lovely,_ and he is. She recognises his dark halfway-skin, like her own - not quite man and not quite seal - but even through that she can see large brown eyes, thick dark lashes. He’s not tall, but he’s strong-looking, sturdy. Part of Rey finds it hard to see why these creatures strike such fear; he is not as beautiful as Kylo, but he is not ugly, and if he approached her as a Man in a safe and bustling place like Fiodh Ard, she wonders if she would be averse to him.

Her second thought is that she is frozen stiff with abject terror. 

It is in part terror from what she has been told, and then more from somewhere deep in her chest. _Run run run run run swim swim swim swim swim -_ like an old mother’s warning that trickles down, down, down. 

Rey stares at him, and he stares back. He looks at her, looks at Ben, looks behind her to the blankness of the beach. He comes up out of the water a little, sea lapping at his dappled brown chest. His head moves ever so slightly, nostrils barely flaring as he sniffs the air.

_He’ll kill Ben,_ she realises.

She cannot hear Kylo behind her. The _fearrón_ lifts his head, sniffing. It isn’t a chance for Rey to run. She suspects he is used to this, the frozen terror, and is used to plucking her kind up wherever he can find them without much resistance beyond shrieks and cries.

His black eyes flicker to Ben again, and they narrow. His nostrils flare. 

Ben stops what he is doing and looks at Rey. She sees him from the corner of her eye, unable to take her gaze away from the selkie, and sees how he turns his head ever so slowly to where she is looking. He gives the tiniest gasp.

“Don’t move,” Rey breathes, mouth barely moving. “Don’t speak.”

The selkie is moving. He takes another step, then another, then another, until he is but waist-deep. She can see the power in him, then. He could kill her in an instant, though she is sure his kind are not accustomed to granting such a mercy.

Rey moves her hand slowly and grasps her spear, sitting by her in the sand.

The _fearrón_ sees, and he smiles a sharp smile of seal-teeth. Just ankle-deep, now, and then a sharp sprint up the sand, and Rey will be forced to _move._

The hard marram grass crunches behind her. “I got your apples, but I think there’s a worm in one. You can give that to the seagulls, if they-”

Kylo stops where he is. The apples hit the sand. Rey cannot see his face, but the _fearrón_ in the water looks right at him, and with every drop of an apple his black eyes seem to widen.

  
The selkie comes up a little further out of the water. Rey thinks he means to come for them, still, but he bolts the other way instead.

Kylo catches him by the ankle.

For all that Rey can outrun him, he is still dangerously fast. He thunders down the sand and catches the _fearrón_ almost in midair as he hauls himself up a flat of wet rock and goes to jump back into the water. His momentum lost, the selkie hits the rock face-first, and Kylo drags him back hard on it so that it tears his face and he roars.

Ben screeches. Distracted, Kylo looks up the strand to where they are. The _fearrón_ rears, and claws him across the chest. 

They battle, roaring and tearing and thrashing. Rey drags Ben back from the fight, his little rages becoming panicked shrieks. Kylo catches hold of the selkie’s dark ringlets and yanks them so sharply that half of them come away in his hand. Rey has never heard a shriek like it, and imagines the pain must be terrible.

They tumble across the sand, Kylo breaking and biting, the selkie clawing. 

The selkie is strong, force barreling out from his stout form, but Kylo is so much bigger, strength so much greater. Like a stag he draws his head back and violently butts his head against the selkie’s so that he goes backwards, spewing blood.

When he falls, Kylo gets on top on him, and Rey knows that the selkie’s battle is lost.

Kylo beats him so savagely that Rey can see chunks and strands of gore coming away with every punch. The dryer sand there is powdery and clumped with blood.

Ben pulls Rey to the rock, calmer now. She lifts him, holds him, feels the hammering of his child’s heart. He is panting, but he isn’t afraid now, not now that he can see his father, see him winning. “It’s alright,” he keeps saying, almost to himself. “ _Tadig_ is alright. It’s alright.”

“He’s just fine, you see?” Rey whispers, feeling coming back to her hands. “He’ll get rid of him, just watch.”

Her hand flies over her mouth when Kylo kicks the selkie’s head away from his body.

Ben breathes a heavy sigh of relief. “Dead,” he tells Rey. “Properly dead. Sometimes they wake up if you don’t do that. _Tadig,_ is he gone?”

“He’s gone,” Kylo says, and his voice is trembling.

“Jesus, I - come here. Fucking hell,” Rey gasps, pulling him to her, not caring for the blood. “Oh, Kylo - are you alright?”

“I’m fine.” He sounds choked. He lifts Ben up and squeezes him, burying his face in the child’s shoulder. Ben pats his back, looking at Rey from where he is held, face all red now with selkie’s blood. “You were a good boy, looking after Rey like that.”

Ben beams down at Rey. She can only smile, shaky. Kylo squeezes her hand, lets the child down, and turns and stalks down the beach. Rey goes to call after him, confused, but Ben stops her.

“He’s making sure none come back,” the boy tells her.

“What?”

Ben leads her down, following his father.

“Keep Rey up there, Ben.”

“I’m fine,” she insists. Kylo is pulling a gnarled stick of thick white driftwood upright, dragged from a pile of dead trees at the trapped outcrop.

Ben lingers with Rey. Clearly he has seen this before, and watches calmly; Kylo takes the driftwood and sharpens it even more with the edge of a flat stone. He shoves it right through the selkie’s skull. Rey flinches at the sound, the gristly crunch, and stares as Kylo sets up upright on the rock from whence it tried to escape, steadied by stones at its base so that its dead eyes look out over the sea.

The _fearrón_ ’s remaining wet ringlets blow sluggishly in the breeze. Blood flows down the driftwood stick and covers the stones supporting it. 

Ben pats her arm, leaving a bloody print. “So the others will see it,” he supplies helpfully. “So they won’t come here. We did it before, me and _tadig,_ and another one popped up and ran away because he was scared.”

Rey has seen severed heads before, too, on the walls of the town. Traitors, rapers, thieves.

_Nothing like this_ . _I hope he burns in Hell._

Kylo pitches the limp body into the shallows. Rey doesn’t like looking at the head, its dark ringlets slick and coppery with blood, trickling down the rock in watery rivulets of salted scarlet.

The waves shift and drag the broken body out to sea, inch by inch. _Out to Hell._ The dark wet sand beneath it reddens, and the seafoam is tinted ugly pink. Rey cannot help but think of what was left of Hux, and how it stained the strand. Ben clings to Rey's leg. 

"Are you sick?" he asks, patting her belly. "Do you feel sick when you see blood?"

"No. I'm fine, I-" She swallows. "I'm just glad that you're alright."

Ben picks up a fistful of torn ringlets from the sand and pockets them in his wet britches. 

They watch Kylo give the body a violent kick as the waves bring it back a little, and then a returning wave douses him in water, making the foam pinker from the blood sloughing off him. Ben runs to greet him when he comes back up.

“Ben,” Kylo says, and he sounds unsteady, choked. It frightens Rey; she has never heard him so unsettled, has never seen him so pale. “Go and find me some green grass, good boy, my stomach is twisting to all hell.”

Ben goes, ever the good child, and when he is out of sight and safely inland, Kylo takes Rey and crushes her against him. 

“I’m sorry,” she hears him manage, over and over. His heart is hammering in his chest. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, _dousa,_ I’m so sorry.”

Rey weeps at the sound of it. “Stop it! Stop it,” she insists. “You didn’t know. You didn’t know, Kylo.” She makes him pull back, takes his face in her hands. “You didn’t see. _I_ didn’t even see -”

“I _should_ have known,” he bites, fighting tears. “I should have _Seen_ .” He knuckles his eyes hard and then says, “The old mare was right. _I_ was right. Something was bound to happen. Fucking _hell_ . Something _else_ could happen.”

“No,” Rey exclaims. “Don’t think that!”

“What else am I to think?” he demands of her. “I leave you and Ben for less time than it takes to piss up a tree and a _reungwir_ just happens out of the sea like a fucking _ghost_!”

“You’ve said yourself they go roaming around, searching!” She's panicky, both from what she has witnessed and from the thought that Kylo might drag her from here and never allow her to touch sand again.

“This is different and you know it, Rey - you could have been killed - he could have _taken_ you-”

“No, it _isn’t_ , Kylo. Stop this now - please. He’s dead and we’re safe.” When Kylo does not respond, Rey declares, “Then we’ll ask Mon Mothma - won’t we - we’ll ask her and see what she says.”

“Yes, we will,” he bites back, “and I’ll pitch her right back into that river where she belongs.”

"Don't," she beseeches him. "Please - just be calm, won't you?" She takes his hands. "Please. Look at me. I'm fine, aren't I? Ben is fine. Breathe, please. It's alright."

Ben comes back with a great handful of sweet green grass, and when Kylo chews it, Rey looks back down towards the sea. 

"We were safe," the child says, out of nowhere. Kylo stops chewing, looks at him. "We were safe, _tadig._ He was scared."

"So he should have been."

"No, _tadig,_ not like that. He was scared before that - ask Mon Mothma." 

For a long moment, Kylo says nothing. He chews, puts a hand on Rey's shoulder, looks down at the sea.

"We'll ask her, then. We'll ask the old mare, alright? Come here, I'll carry you back."

They go, and before the sea has disappeared behind them, Rey turns back to look. The gulls have descended upon the head, a flurry of shrieking white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Translations ******
> 
> **  
> **  
> _Fearrón (Irish) _\- Male seal, male selkie (man-seal)  
>  _Each-uisce (Irish) _\- Water-horse  
>  _Tadig (Gaulish) _\- Dad, father  
>  _Mamm-gozh (Gaulish) _\- grandma, grandmother  
>  _Tad-gozh (Gaulish) _\- grandpa, grandfather_  
>  _a stór (Gaulish) _\- love, sweetheart, treasure  
>  _ebeul (Gaulish) _\- foal, little one, child  
>  _reunig-don-diabarzh (Gaulish) _\- 'selkie-come-inland'  
>  _píce-iasc (Irish) _\- fishing-pike, fishing-spear  
>  _Samanios (Gaulish) _\- the proto-Gaulish equivalent of Samhain.  
>  _reunen (Gaulish) _\- kind of like saying 'sealish' or 'selkwegian'  
>  _mari-morgen (Gaulish) _\- mythical offspring of kelpies and selkies. not a thing.  
>  _caden (Gaulish) _\- yuck, ew, fuck, gross, bleh  
>  _kabell-touseg (Gaulish) _\- mushrooms, the trippy kind.  
>  _foulinenn (Gaulish) _\- fur, pelt, mantle  
>  _dousa (Gaulish) _\- sweetness, sweetheart  
>  _reungwir (Gaulish) _\- male selkie, male seal (equivalent of _fearrón _)___________________________________  
> **  
> **
> 
> _Get me @hagenshall on Tumblr! Happy reading boyos xx_   
> 


	8. On The Tail of the South Wind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ~

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! I'm back (with a schedule) and a roaring fire under my ass. I hope everyone is staying safe - and staying HOME.

__

__ At home, the  _ lucht siúil -  _ the walking folk, the people that are never still - bring their horses over the land, unbridled and unsaddled.

Rey remembers watching the children of the  _ lucht siúil _ being sat on the backs of asses and horses, scarcely two or three, and how readily they rode, backs straightening, taking the manes in their hands without being told.

Ben rides easily.  _ Born riding,  _ Rey thinks,  _ like a little mincéir. _

Kylo carries them both on his dark horse’s back. Ben sits in front of Rey, clinging to the coarse horse’s mane.  _ How odd - how strange _ .  _ How happy he is with it, with his father the warhorse. _

Something in her mind reminds her that Ben knows no different.

Kylo covers the ground like some mad beast, hooves hard and as loud as thunder. When he kicks, airborne over a fallen tree, Ben leans back against Rey.

Just before the clearing of trees by the river, Kylo drops to his great knees, and Rey slides off his dark back with Ben in her arms. He pulls back into his man-skin and yanks on the clothes Rey gives him.

__ "Don't start," Rey implores him.

Mon Mothma is telling a story, surrounded by an eager crowd. The others part like biblical ocean when Kylo storms through them. Ben races past him, dodging his father’s hand, and declares passionately, “My  _ tadig  _ killed a  _ reungwir! _ ”

The others gasp; Leia rushes forward, pushing between Jyn and Cassian to snatch the child up. “What happened? Kylo?” she demands. Rey feels eyes on the bloody print on her shift, down Kylo’s chin and chest, his wrists and hands.

“We went to the bay and some great filthy selkie  _ cunt  _ came out of the sea after Rey,” Kylo snarls. "Is this what you were  _ dreaming _ ?"

Ben wrestles his way free of Leia’s arms and produces the selkie’s bloody ringlets from his pocket. The crowd shrinks back where he points the hank of hair. 

Mon Mothma just watches them. She looks almost bored, Rey thinks, and when she steps close to Kylo to take his hand, he pulls her forward, puts her beside him.

“Are you deaf as well as old?” he demands of Mon Mothma. “A  _ reungwir.  _ In the black bay.”

“I know,” Mothma says simply, eyeing him, eyeing Rey. “I saw.”

Kylo falls silent, and with his silence and stillness the others quieten and still, too. He looks down at where the old mare sits swaddled, and she gazes back up at him with as much concern as a child.

“You saw,” he repeats. "You  _ did  _ see."

“Yes. Bulky, black hair. Followed the scent on the tail of the south wind, and met his end under your hands. I saw. I see no longer."

Kylo is tense and raging under Rey’s hand where she lays it on his arm, warning.

“You saw him coming and you didn’t think to tell her,” Kylo echoes, quite as if he can’t believe it, and the volume of his voice rises sharply. “You knew and you would have seen her stolen, seen my son killed, you streamborn  _ bi- _ ”

Rey hangs on to him as he lurches and exclaims, “Kylo!  _ Don’t-” _

Damaz smacks a giant hand onto Kylo’s chest as he snarls. “Enough, enough,” he insists, shoving him.

“Peace,” Mothma says, irritably - Kylo ignores her, raving, pulling against Damaz like a stallion at stud - then louder, “ _ peace,  _ I said!”

“Don’t,” Rey hears Damaz telling Kylo, hands on his chest. “Come on, now. Go easy.”

“ _ Den bras,  _ why do you raise your voice so?” Mon Mothma demands of him, and Kylo thrusts himself past Damaz momentarily to bark his answer.

"Because I won't suffer to hear  _ you  _ if you try to tell me something foolish."

“You’ll watch your tongue when you speak to me,  _ sallkeur,  _ or I’ll snatch it clean out,” Mothma warns. Kylo snaps his teeth at her, and Ben comes barreling up to pummel his father’s side with insistent fists. 

“ _ Tadig _ , listen! You have to listen! Tell him!” Ben insists, going to crouch by Mon Mothma, showing her the selkie’s hair.

She takes it and says scornfully to Kylo, “It must be a sting for your child to have more sense than its father.”

“You shut your  _ fucking  _ mouth, you wild old bitch."

Ben gasps. "Kylo!" Leia exclaims, and the reverent streamborns grizzle and scowl. The saltborns bristle, and Cassian pushes past Rey to aid Damaz in shouldering Kylo back.

Mon Mothma demands of Kylo, “Do you not  _ See _ ? A  _ reungwir  _ is held to what he does by  _ himself,  _ by his own kind. It’s a soft thing, to them, to walk away from a lone  _ reuna -  _ even if he dies trying to drag her back to his rock. Your foal is right - the one you bit and broke was frightened.”

“Frightened of  _ what? _ ” Kylo exclaims. “He made to kill them  _ both- _ ”

“But he didn’t,” Mothma interrupts. She lifts the handful of hair into the air and the crowd recoils even now. “He  _ ran _ . He saw your son, saw what he was, saw your  _ reuna _ . Do not make the mistake of thinking that the  _ reungwerin  _ are stupid, dead man. They are foolish and they are cruel, but they are not stupid.” Ben sits close, fascinated. “He saw your  _ reuna  _ with a  _ sallkeur  _ child, and in his mind it could only be that he was hers - and so then, by that, that she walked with a  _ sallkeur _ herself.”

Rey looks at Kylo, expectant. “Don’t you see?” she asks. He doesn’t look at her.

“That  _ reungwir  _ had two choices, dead man,” Mothma tells him. “Run, and face the wrath of the other men, or face you. He chose to run. You didn’t let him.”

Kylo snarls, “Nor should I have.”

“No, nor should you have. But you - your kind - are one of the only things that will frighten a  _ reungwir. _ "

"Rot," he accuses her.

"If only your ears weren't so packed with salt - perhaps then you would  _ hear,  _ you great fool."

Damaz snaps at Mon Mothma, “Did you wake up just to ire us?”

Ben interrupts them and exclaims, “She’s helping us!”

“ _ Bez’an didrouz _ ,” Kylo orders him.

“No!” the foal bellows back. “No,  _ tadig _ , you have to  _ listen! _ ”

“Yes,  _ listen. _ It would do you good to listen, for once,  _ den maro.  _ Must your child See for you?” Mothma asks.

Kylo says nothing for a moment, mouth slightly open, and looks towards Ben. The foal gazes back at him from his crouch beside Mothma, so still he could be wakeless.

“Yes,” Mon Mothma says, as if someone has spoken. “Your child sees without his eyes. Your child has always Seen - only you weren’t here to witness for the longest time, were you?”

_ Without his eyes.  _ Rey squeezes Kylo’s wrist. “Do you hear?” she whispers. “Listen to her, Kylo.”

Leia puts her hand on her chest, face steady. Mothma puts a hand on Ben’s hair. 

“Your foal told you the  _ reungwir  _ was afraid,  _ den maro _ , and he was. The beast was nowhere in sight. Does this not mean proof?”

Rey recalls the  _ reungwir' _ s smile; tight, forced. She imagines how he swallowed his fear, and brought it back up when Kylo tore and broke him.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” someone else interrupts, and Rey sees Han brushing past Leia. 

He dodges her darting hand and exclaims, “He’s a clever child - it doesn’t mean he’s - he’s-” He dares look at Kylo, and Kylo’s snarl at his gaze makes him step instantly back.

Kaydel stands at Kylo’s flank and sets her jaw, glaring down at Mothma as if she is shit on a shoe. Jessika goes with her, and Ilsa, and Jyn, until the circle of seaborns is wider than their inland counterparts.

“That’s enough,” Leia says suddenly. “That’s enough, all of you. I won’t have you fighting, not in front of the children. Ben, come here.”

The child pouts and resists, leaning against Mon Mothma’s side. Leia growls, “ _ Ben. _ ”

It takes several hours for Leia and Rey to calm Kylo, restrain Ben, and question Mon Mothma in the same instance. She insists on rest once they are done, when the sky is reddening, and Rey notices that Leia has slipped away.

Kylo hefts Ben into his arms. "Where did  _ mamm-gozh  _ go?" the child asks, resplendent in the setting sun.

"I'll find her - you stay."

Rey follows the path she knows now, over along the riverbank to the next little clearing of trees, where often the streamborns gather, though it is noticeably bare. She hears their splashing from the river, and presses on.

“... nothing to do with you, nothing to do with the  _ stupid  _ things you believe."

Rey sees Leia, and Han beside her, arguing, on the edge of the bank in the near-sunset. She sinks back against the nearest tree when she realises that they are snapping, and listens, breathing shallowly.

“... deluding the child. He’s no more a seer than I am.”

“Han, I’m going to warn you  _ once,” _ Leia hisses, snatching hold of the neck of his shirt and dragging his face close to hers. “If you say another word about it - one more! - I’ll beat that smirk clean off your face.”

“ _ Will _ you?” he retorts, but does not cast her hand away.

“You know I will. It was  _ your  _ kind that fell about Mothma when she awoke. Now she tells us that Ben sees beyond his eyes and  _ now  _ you don’t believe?”

He pushes her hand off now, eyes bright with anger.  _ Like Kylo _ . Rey is careful to stay behind the tree. The moss is damp against her back, and a foal’s pet magpie is staring at her from the bough above. Rey leans her head back against the moss and does not look, only listens.

“Don’t start this.”

“I’ll start what I like. Get away from me, now, and don’t say a word of this to Ben.”

“You know what will happen, don’t you? Kylo will pass down his poisoned view of me, and then I’ll lose a grandson, too. Or is that what you want? Your own little  _ kelc’h  _ of seers?”

A sharp _crack_ rings against the trees as Leia slaps Han across the face. Rey flinches against the moss.

“How dare you,” Rey hears Leia say lowly. “How  _ dare  _ you, you jealous beast, how  _ dare  _ you say something like that to me-”

“My son was  _ dead _ ,” Han fumes. There is a rustle as Leia goes to smack him again and he rebuffs her. “Don’t - don’t!"

"You treated your son like dirt!" A slap lands, and they struggle. Rey thinks to rush in and break up the exchange, but doesn't. "You treated him like  _ shit,  _ and now that he's a man grown you care to know him?"

"Don't you lay a hand on me, you blasted bitch - get off! My son was gone -  _ gone,  _ Leia - and now he won’t look at me. I won’t have the same from Ben, I  _ won’t _ !”

Hands hit cloth and flesh as Leia shoves him. “Then don’t do to him what you did to Kylo.”

Han does not answer. Rey hears the crack and crunch of twigs and leaves underfoot as someone tramps away. She does not look back, pushing off the tree, following the path back to where Kylo and Ben will be.

  
  


\-----------------

  
  


Ben is drawing pictures in the dust with the other foals in the light of the dying sun while Kylo watches from afar. He sits propped up against a tree, looking grumpy, but always smiling and praising the child when Ben runs to show him some curiosity or other. His chest and face are clean of blood. When he sees Rey, he opens his arms.

“Come here to me,” Kylo grumbles, and she does, sitting between his legs and lying her weight back against him. He folds his arms over her tummy. “Did you find her?”

Rey lies, “She was with the others.”

“Right. That old mare’s asleep. I didn’t want you to have to hear that - what she said.”

It is on the tip of Rey’s tongue to tell him what she has just overheard - Han and Leia, snarling in the clearing - but something stops her. 

“I wanted to hear. I’m glad for it. I’m glad for Ben.”

He bends his head and kisses her brow, her temple, her nose. “So am I. Now he knows. But that old mare is a pain.”

“Mm.” She reaches up for a handful of black hair, pets it like a pony. He gazes down at her, eyes nearly gold in the red sun. 

“How do you feel?”

“Fine - but I’m thinking you’d nearly prefer Maz to be the one telling you your enormous things, instead of Mothma.”

Kylo huffs. "I'd be glad for it. I'd nearly be glad for  _ your  _ mother, now, over  _ her. _ "

Rey stares at him. "You!" she dares. She wonders, if Kylo wasn't so wild and Phasma so stubborn, if they would get along. "Would you really?"

“I might have to.” Kylo looks meaningfully at her. “This year will end.”

She feels a little strange in her chest at that. She lets go of his hair and strokes his clasped hands where they rest on her belly instead. The oak above them shades them from the strongest of the sun’s beams. 

“No, I know that. I just didn’t think you  _ wanted  _ to be gone.”

He sighs. “I want you, is all. What do you say, then? I promised I'd bring you home. Eventually."

"I know. We have months."

"I know. Still. I wanted to come home, but -" He seems to struggle. "Us, a home of our own, with Ben, in Ériú - it feels better, when I think on it.”

"Just us," she murmurs.

He hesitates. "Don't you want to?"

"That's all I want. But Ben is just a little boy, and - what if he was sick to leave? What if he wouldn't go? And - and Leia - can we leave her?"

Firmly, he says, " _ Mammig _ knows. I told her. She knows I won't keep you here, but she won't leave here either. We could come back every single year, at the end of your summer, when it's still hot and good here, and go home when the frost comes. Two months here, maybe three. Like how birds do. Wouldn't you like that?"

She considers this a moment, and realises that she rather would. She takes a moment to imagine the pleasure of crisp spring and soft early summer in Ériú giving way to the blinding green midsummer of Enez Karn. 

“I really think I would, you know,” Rey admits. “It’d all be different.”

On the wind, she can smell cooking - someone roasting meat for the foals, toasting cobnuts over a flat rock. The breeze comes a little cooler, fresh and green, rolling the collar of her shift. 

“A  _ good  _ different,” her man promises, cupping her face in two giant paws.

“A good one,” she echoes, leaning on his palm, and smiles.

He strokes her cheeks. "You're soft when you want to be," Rey tells him. "I like that, when you're soft."

Kylo's eyes darken, and he smiles. "Don't you like me when I'm hard?" 

"I like that, too. I like when you're hard - all lovely and hard and achy," Rey dares. He shows her his teeth, grizzling. "I like it when you want me."

Voice barely human, he says, "I always want you."

"Even now, when I'm all dusty?"

"Even now," he promises. "And if you keep up with that, I'll bend you over in that dust and fuck you til you're full."

She squeezes her thighs together, cheeks warming. "Maybe I'll keep up with it then. I like when you fill me up."

He growls, and she giggles at that, until they are interrupted by calls from the river; Ben and the other foals insisting that he come to play.

"Go," Rey urges him, and he groans. "Go on, go. You can bend me over later."

"I fucking will. Give me a kiss before I go."

She does, and he goes, and she lingers at the tree awhile, warm and wanting, until she wanders off with her spear in her hand. She picks along the fallen trees for a time, balancing and chasing squirrels, until she comes back around to the riverbank. There are more foals there, splashing, and she stands and watches. The sunset blinds her, but she does not look away from it even so.

"Do you know," she hears, "that old mare is starting to fuck me off."

Leia comes and stands beside her, face unusually pinched. 

Rey avoids her gaze and agrees, "Me as well. Quite a bit."

"If only our old mares were saltborn. But they all sleep in the sea. Would that we could all do the same."

Rey hums in agreement. A group of foals race past. They watch them go, squealing and giggling.

Abruptly, Leia asks, "What did Han say to you?"

Rey starts in surprise. 

"I saw you both," Leia says reproachfully, "going up the hill to the cliffs. Ben knew, but he wouldn't tell. I knew Han would come skulking around to tell his tale at some point."

She considers lying to her, but thinks better of it. "He wanted me to make Kylo talk to him." Rey goes a little pink. It seems silly now, the secrecy, and yet she is sure that she could never conceal it herself. She thinks, maybe, to mention the dispute she witnessed, but thinks better of that, too.

Leia looks very hard at her, jaw tight. "Do you know  _ why _ Kylo doesn't talk to him?"

"Yes," she concedes. "Han told me. I told him he was horrible for it. He  _ is _ ."

"Yes, he is," Leia echoes. She crosses her arms tightly over her chest. "Gods, I beat him to within an inch of his last breath when I found out what he did to Kylo. Slapped him in the face - a little foal! Right in the  _ face _ ! I half forget it - I beat him and beat him. I was so  _ angry _ ."

Before Rey can reply, Leia spits, "And he had the  _ neck _ to say that Kylo wasn't his son. That he was seeded by one of the men from the bay where I was born. I  _ should _ have taken up with one of them, when I cast Han out, just to ire him."

"I would have," Rey says spitefully. "I would have taken up with the biggest, wildest one in the bay. I would have killed Han. I was so angry when he told me I cried."

"I should have. Would that I could go back."

“Would that you could,” Rey agrees.

Leia studies her, brown eyes a little shiny. "So what will you do?" she asks her, clearing her throat. "Will you speak to Han or let him speak to Kylo himself?"

Rey chews her lip. "I don't know." Beyond them, Ben squalls joyously. "If I ask Kylo, he'll know Han spoke to me, and he'll go wild. If Han asks him  _ himself _ , he'll go even wilder."

"Then let him be wilder. Han hasn't been held to his words before. Might be this will teach him to hold himself.” 

“Han will tell him that I knew.”

“He might. Do you think you could keep Kylo from breaking his neck if you told him that Han had you alone?”

“I think I could.”

Oddly bitter, Leia says, “Then, by all means, tell him. But he’ll be angry. Rightfully angry.”

“Does he think what Mon Mothma said was a lie?” Rey asks suddenly, and Leia goes still. 

“I - I heard you, earlier. Snapping. Does he believe what she said about Ben?”

Leia doesn’t say anything for a long time. They look at the setting sun instead, quiet. 

“He has never believed in those things. I can’t change him. I tried - years ago I would tell him what I saw, and it would come to pass, and still he wouldn’t believe. But what Mon Mothma says about Ben is true; he  _ does  _ see, he always has, and no amount of disbelief will blind him."

"Good."

"If you heard us, you know that Han worries about losing Ben. He's already lost him - he doesn't trust himself not to react the same way, and Ben will come to see that. His sight, it's…" She sighs, thinking. "Not as strong as yours or Kylo's, but sight is sight. It'll do him good to learn to use it. You can’t change the unchangeable mind, Rey. You know that well, do you not?”

“I do. It doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“You don’t have to like anything. You just have to walk on.”

Rey nurses that thought for the rest of the evening 

She plays with Ben in the grass until it is nearly dark, when the child is tired. Han looks pointedly at her at intervals, glares meaningful, and so when Kylo has taken Ben to the riverbank to wash his face and hair before the night falls, she crosses the bumps and little valleys of the flat above it to where the streamborns congregate. 

She goes to Han directly and snaps, “Stop  _ fucking  _ looking at me. You ask him yourself.” She does not care for the other streamborns’ startled looks, their disapproving glares. 

Han rears up out of where he sits almost in the hollow of a tree, eyes bright in the gleam of the gloaming moon. 

"Keep your  _ voice  _ down-"

"Then you stop glowering at me. Take a hold of yourself and stop fucking about."

“-and do what?” he demands of her. “Cause a fight in front of the child? You’d let that happen?”

“You can’t cow me like you did to him. The only person he’ll fight is you, and I can sleep just fine knowing that. Glowering at me day and night isn’t going to make me change my mind. If you keep doing it, I’ll tell him you asked me, and he’ll beat you black and blue just like you deserve.”

She leaves him stinging. She is stolen away by Ben and the other foals to play in the river while they scrub their faces, and dares not refuse. By the time night has truly fallen, they are all asleep in a pile of snores and snuffles, and when she goes back, Kylo is reclining on her sheepskin, dozing. She wakes him by straddling his belly and patting his chest.

“Sleepy,” Rey murmurs, pinching him softly. “Wake up.”

"I promised to fuck you," he purrs in the dim blue dark, going to roll her over.

She stops him. "Not yet. I have something to tell you."

"Tell me, then," he says, gripping her hips.

Rey lies down atop of him, belly flush to his. “Don’t be angry now,” she insists. If she looks closely, she can see the barest reflection of the stars above them in the brown of his eyes.

“ _ Tell  _ me,” Kylo grumbles. He puts his nose to her ear and huffs. Rey insists, “Promise you won’t go wild.”

“I promise.”

Rey looks at him very gravely. The night air is cool and crisp. 

“Your father spoke to me.”

Kylo’s nostrils flare. He rears under her, and it is all that Rey can do to cling onto him so that he doesn’t scramble up and pull Han to pieces in his sleep. 

“Stop, stop!  _ Quiet,  _ Kylo -”

They tussle for a moment. Rey clings to him like a burr, trying to use her weight to hold him down, but he rolls her abruptly onto her back. He pins her to the sheepskin and tells her sharply, "I'll  _ kill _ him."

It occurs to her that Kylo has not asked what Han said, has not wondered when the exchange happened. She is suddenly very glad that Ben did not tell. She imagines that Kylo would not look kindly on the idea of Han taking Rey far to the cliffs to insist on her help.

Rey tries to knee him, and he puts his weight stubbornly on her. "You let me up. You  _ won't.  _ Listen. He wanted me to speak to you  _ for  _ him. But I told him no. I just - I didn’t want him to speak to you himself and then have you discover that I’d known all along.”

He searches her face for a long time, and then rolls off. She catches his wrist, thinking he will race to the river's edge and clap Han awake in the moonlight, but he rolls onto his back instead and goes still, seething.

"I just wanted you to know. Listen," she pleads, sitting up. She pets his face, then his chest. "To make  _ sure  _ you knew."

Kylo studies the stars, shifting his mouth in his angry way. “Stop,” Rey demands, pinching his lips. He bats her hand away and squeezes her to his side, big paw tight about her waist. “You stop that. Don’t be angry.  _ Kylo. _ ”

“I’ll break his legs,” Kylo says very plainly.

“No, you won’t.” Rey props her elbows up on his chest.

“I  _ will.  _ He had  _ no right- _ ”

“Will you fucking  _ whisht,  _ for God’s sake - you  _ promised _ .”

He settles into silence again. 

"I think you should be - be  _ reasonable _ ."

"There's nothing  _ reasonable  _ about this," he argues.

"Then what will you do?"

"Break his legs."

" _ Kylo. _ "

He splutters, "What would you  _ have _ me do?  _ Oh, _ yes  _ tadig,  _ of course I've forgotten what a filthy rivery fuck you are, now carry me on your shoulders like a foal. You know me better than that, Rey, surely."

"I don't know. Forever is a long time."

"And what a time it will be not to hear him squalling."

"You're so stubborn sometimes."

He is on top of her again before she can blink, body heavy down on hers. "I'll show you  _ stubborn _ . Kiss me."

"No," she grumbles, though she rubs her cheek against his in the dying dark. "You  _ are  _ stubborn. You don't listen."

Kylo purrs, "Make me listen, then."

"Listen properly first. Listen, listen.  _ Look _ at me." She takes hold of his face and squeezes his cheeks. "You love me. But you have to be good. Listen."

He growls lazily, showing her his teeth.

"Whether you want him or not - whether you want to know him or not - I think you should hear him."

Kylo softly bites her thumb to make clear his displeasure. Rey tells him, "Just once. Just  _ hear _ him, and then decide."

"He'll only lie."

"Then hear his lies. You don't have to believe them. You don't have to speak to him ever again."

He nips her thumb again, and puts the weight of his head into her hands. 

"Did he tell you what he did?"

"Yes. He's a cunt."

"Did your father ever do those things?"

"Never," she says.

He closes his eyes. "Good."

For a long moment they lie in soft silence. Rey looks at his face, so still he could be asleep, cast grey by the moon. She twirls a tendril of his dark hair around her finger. The trees shift with the gentle breeze, and an owl hoots somewhere far away. 

Purposely, she rolls onto her side, leaving him cold.

He growls, “Come back here now.”

“No.”

His paw lands on her hip. “ _ Rey. _ ”

Rey peeks over her shoulder at him and, ever so slightly, sticks out her backside in her shift. She sees his eyes blacken even in the darkness, but he does not immediately grasp her. He moves slowly, shifts onto his side to mimic her, pushes his hips directly into her rear, and begins to roll them ever-so-slowly.

“Oh,” she puffs, encouraging him. She likes that, always has; he’s good at pumping his clothed hips that way, shifting and pushing until she’s wet and grinding, desperate for purchase on the ridge of his erection.

Kylo keeps moving, keeps rolling his hips, and slowly pushes the hem of her shift up her calf, her thigh, her hip. When the cloth of his britches rubs against her bare backside, she shivers, delighted. Her shift bunches about her ribs.

Rey lets her head tilt back, and Kylo bites softly at her exposed neck. In the same moment as this, he reaches beneath her bare thigh and places his massive hand over her cunt.

She lets her leg rest on his arm, then, and murmurs, “More.”

He gives her a little huff of amusement, stroking. Rey insists, “Kylo…”

Gently, he adds a finger. She is quite wet, takes it with ease, and yet she says his name again, wriggling and spoilt.

“Hm?” He noses her ear and gives her another finger, curling very gently.

“Feels nice,” is all she can say. His fingers are thick and warm, but she wants more than that - wants  _ him,  _ pressed up against her back and inside her, grunting and nipping.

She drags softly at the bulge in his britches to convey this, squeezing. He makes a long, deep sound, pushing himself against her palm, and rests his head on hers. It's a question, even now.

"I want to," Rey tells him.

With his teeth, he pulls at the neckline of her shift, and grunts, "Off."

She takes it off over her head, sitting up on her knees in the dark, and when it is in her hand he takes it from her and pitches it away. He does the same with his shirt, his britches, and pulls her flush against him, his belly to her back. He takes her as they lie on their sides, her head supported by his bulky arm. They’ve never done this before - always it has been Kylo on top or behind, and rarer, Rey atop of his belly. 

She's glad, somehow, for her strange domesticity. Born horde-wild, she imagines the transition would be almost frightening; from pain and hurt or nothing at all at the hands of a  _ fearrón  _ to the giant hands of an impassioned, forceful lover. He  _ is  _ forceful, beautifully so, and he has only ever hurt her just that once, when first he mounted her in her little stone hut, storm raging about them. Even then it was momentary, a bare prologue sting to the wonder that would follow.

__ Kylo grunts, " _ Me ga'r achanout. _ " He rubs her clit, insistent that she come.

"I know," Rey gasps, reaching back to clutch at his face. Kylo sinks his teeth into her neck, warning  _ say it back,  _ and instead she bites  _ him _ , nipping his cheek when he puts it against hers. 

He buries the long groan of his orgasm into her throat, eyes squeezed shut, and she squeaks hers out as quietly as she can. Even despite how he pulses inside her, filling her with seed, she laughs at their efforts to stay silent.

They are too limp and contented to light a fire, and so Rey chews the seeds that make her fallow in the dark. 

"I'm sick of the taste now," Rey teases, and Kylo grizzles, biting at her. "But not so sick that I'll stop yet."

" _ Yet _ ," he echoes. 

Kylo nuzzles her, purring. Rey murmurs, chewing, "Sometimes I think about it. When I see other babies."

"What do you think about it?"

"Just things. I'm not scared like I was."

He presses his lips to her bare shoulder, smiling. Rey pets his cheek. "I have little dreams, sometimes, where I'm standing on the strand at home, and I'm  _ huge. _ "

Kylo splutters with laughter against her, head to her neck, and mocks her, "Huge!"

"I  _ do _ ! Properly huge. Those are just dreams I have. But we'll soon see."

He cups her belly as if it is already big. "Soon," he murmurs, resting his head on her. Rey's eyes flutter, heavy. The softness of the summer darkness puts her to sleep.

When the day comes, it is warm and hazy, and Rey is concerned that Kylo might lunge for Han, but he says and does nothing. He lounges with Rey on the riverbank, dozing against her belly, and she strokes his hair softly in the sun.

Several of the foals have found handfuls of late woad, and have set to grinding it up into a paste of deepest blue in shallow bowls, softened with water and thickened with scum skimmed off slick riverweed. They paint themselves and their parents with it, chasing one another with faces and hands as blue as the summer sea. 

Ben comes to Kylo and Rey with a bowl full of it and pleads to paint them both. He draws a delicate spiral on Rey's neck with his fingertips and plants a blue handprint on her cheek. Rey blues her fingertips and paints three diligent lines down each side of Kylo's chest; starkly dark on his white skin. Ben puts a handprint under one set of lines, and urges Rey to do the same. She wonders if he knows more than her, little mind taught from birth to Know things under the Knowing of anyone.

Rey paints Kylo’s face in the same way she did his chest. He settles, head in her lap, lying skyward. Ben paints his wolves, decorating them with blue handprints, circling their eager eyes and matting their coats with it.

“You look pretty,” she coos, “all the blue.”

He tuts, but he  _ does,  _ in a strange, godlike way - painted sea-blue like some wild god-giant of salt and silver, his Gaelic torc shimmering about his thick neck. 

Mothma, occupied with telling a pack of streamborns some enormous truth, suddenly faints.

The river-wet crowd about her, concerned. Leia parts them, insisting, "Peace, peace - she's asleep. She's just sleeping." 

_ Just sleeping.  _ Kylo and Rey wait, watch. Ben leans on Kylo, curious, and when Leia returns she is drawn, brow pinched. 

Ben climbs into Rey's arms and settles with his arms around her neck. Rey asks Leia, "Is Mothma - is she alright?"

“She’s going to sleep again soon," Leia tells her. Ben rests his head on Rey's shoulder and watches. "She's an old, old mare. She'll wake up less and less as the years go on, until she walks into the Night Land."

"Like my  _ mammig _ ," Ben chirps in Rey's ear. "My  _ mammig _ is in the Night Land, isn't she,  _ mamm-gozh _ ?" 

"Yes,  _ ebeul _ ."

"Will Mon Mothma see my  _ mammig _ when she goes to sleep?"

"She might."

In his child's way, Ben immediately focuses his attention elsewhere. " _ Mamm-gozh,  _ will you play sticks with me?"

She does, and Rey sits back down with Kylo, sighing.

"I think I love him, you know."

He holds her. "I know you do."

"He's just … he's so lovely. Like you. Like  _ you,"  _ she jibes, poking him. Kylo purrs, head to her shoulder. "And I love you."

"I know," he says, and smiles for her. 

“Do you really think he’ll go with us?”

“I think he will.”

“Should we ask him?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

Kylo does his mouth-thing, looking towards where the child plays, and says, “Now.”

When they call him, he skips over, pup in tow, raven curls bouncing. He comes to a stop when he sees them both, not grave but solemn still, and stares.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!” Kylo insists. “Nothing - we have something to tell you.”

Ben looks at him. “Is it bad?”

“No! No, it isn’t bad. Come, sit, and I’ll tell you.”

He perches on his father’s knee, unsure. His grey eyes flicker between them both, all over their faces, searching; a little seeing-foal. 

The wolves follow; the biggest male climbs bodily into Rey’s lap, and pups clamber all over Kylo. She scratches its dark chest, and tells Ben, “It’s good news - isn’t it, Kylo?”

“Yes, very good. Listen - Rey and I spoke,  _ ebeul _ , and we were thinking - you remember how I told you that Rey’s  _ m _ ammig wants her back in a year’s time?”

“But it hasn’t been a year!” the child protests.

“No, I  _ know,  _ soft thing. I was thinking that - if you wanted to - we could go to Ériú. We could come back here for the entire summer, every year - like a special journey, every single year.”

Ben looks at them both. There is a little daisy tucked behind his ear, and he fiddles with it as he thinks. “With you?” he asks. “-and Rey?”

“Yes, with both of us,  _ ebeul. _ ”

“Where would we live?”

“With Rey, in the strand. It’s a great big bay, twice as big as the black one, and it has great big fields and forests all behind it.”

Ben leans forward, nibbling his lip. “Is there sea?”

“No strand without sea, Ben.”

“Is there town?”

“Yes, and a river along it. There’s sharks and seals and deer.”

“I like it,  _ tadig _ .”

“You’ve not been yet!”

“No, but I can see it. I like it. Is Rey really going? Rey, are you going with us? Are you coming?” the child asks, turning to her with great soft eyes, clinging to her arm.

“Of course I am, silly,” she says, lifting him from Kylo’s lap to hers. “It’s where I come from. Of course I’m coming.”

Ben beams. "Yes, I want to go. You promise," he insists, looking between them both. "Both of you?"

"Both of us,  _ carwen _ ," Kylo assures him. "And we'll come back at the end of every spring, and we'll be here while it's nice and warm." 

"Oh." Ben's face falls a little.  _ "Ma bleiz." _

"I thought about that,  _ ebeul _ ." Kylo pokes one of the pups. "We'll build a boat - won't we, Rey - bigger than before. You can bring the new pups that come in the spring."

"Yes, exactly," Rey tells the child. "Would you like that?"

"Yes," he allows, leaning on her. “How far is it?”

“Quite far. Eight days away. Maybe nine.”

"That's not far," he determines, in his child’s way. "I can come back and see my  _ mamm-gozh  _ in only eight days, then. That's not far at all. I can come on my own."

Briefly, Rey imagines the outcome of a solitary foal's encounter with a  _ fearrón  _ or a merrow or anything else unknown, and makes a face. 

Kylo says firmly, "Not on your own. But maybe you're right - maybe it isn't so far."

"No," the child agrees. He pontificates on Rey's shoulder a moment and asks, "And what about your  _ mammig _ ?"

Rey realises with a shock that she hasn't thought of Phasma in days. "What about her?"

"Will she like me?"

"She'll  _ love  _ you," Rey promises, and believes it fully. Phasma was cold and uncertain of Kylo when she discovered what he was, but Kylo was proud and stubborn and cold in return. Rey is sure that it will take Ben mere moments to put Phasma under his cherub's spell.

"And your  _ tadig _ ?"

"He died, love," Rey tells the child.

"How?"

"Fever. He was only of Men, and sometimes they get sick and don't get better."

Ben nods. Kylo tells him, "And you mustn't snap and bite them, even if you're playing. They're nicer Men, but they're still Men and it'll frighten them."

"I  _ know _ ," Ben insists. "Like in town."

"Yes, just like in town."

Ben shows remarkable self-control for his age. Rey wonders if he learned it from Kylo; if trips to town were, before the fall, a beast teaching his foal to hunt in plain sight. She pats Ben's shoulder and pushes from her mind the burgeoning realisation that it does not frighten her any longer.

Ben goes to play with the other foals, squealing and sparring with their painted sticks. Rey curls up in Kylo's lap and watches, head on his arm where it wraps about her. It strikes her as strange that they fight so fairly; no spoilt child screams for the game to stop because they find themselves losing, and there are no tears shed for stray whaps of the stick. 

Kylo strokes her hair and murmurs, "What are you thinking?"

"Nothing," she sighs, and he huffs over her ear, disbelieving. “Well.  _ Some  _ things. Home.”

“Mm.”

“Where  _ will  _ we live? My hut’s too small for a child. It was hardly big enough for  _ us _ .”

He waves it away. “It was plenty big. But I’ll build a new one.”

“In the bay?” She turns her head to look at him and he holds her face in his hand. "But- well, I don't know."

Kylo shrugs, unconcerned, and thumbs her painted cheek. “Wherever. You worry too much,  _ reunig _ .”

“I  _ have _ to worry.”

Blue chest puffing, he insists, “No, you don’t. None of us do. Leave it to me to do the worrying.”

“No,” Rey says stubbornly.

“I  _ said _ , leave it to me." He noses her neck. "I'’ll  _ build  _ a fucking house, bigger than any of those  _ razh _ could build. You know what else - that bay, the one out to the east with the high grass. I could build it there.”

“Kylo,” Rey says, quite plainly. “You’re not a builder.”

“I can  _ be _ a builder,” he insists, prideful, and bites her.

“Oh, can you?” she asks, rolling her eyes. “I suppose you’ll tear the currach out the sand and bend it bigger, too.”

Against her neck, he growls, "We have months. I'll build a bigger one."

"You don't know  _ how _ to build a currach, you bloody fool."

He draws his head back and argues, as if it is plain, " _ You _ show me how, then."

Rey considers this. In theory, she could; she was never allowed to help while the men bent planks of wood and nailed them into a hull, the skeleton of the boat sitting in the sand like the bones of a rotting whale, but she was allowed to watch, and like a rag she soaked up the things they did.

"I might," she tells him, and he clutches her close. "But if I can't, surely you can find boatbuilders in the town, can't you?"

He makes a face of disgust. "No Men."

"Then we'll be swimming home and you'll be balancing those pups on your head." 

"Fine," he bites, though he nuzzles her face even in their mock argument. 

“Oh, fuck off,” Rey laughs, when he goes to nip at her again, and then squeals, “Kylo!" They roll, tussling, and he squeezes her tight, joyful.

"Shall we go for a walk?" Rey asks abruptly, meaning veiled. 

"A walk," he repeats, beaming at her. "You want to walk?"

"I want to be fucked," Rey tells him. "But I was trying to be polite."

She has him chase her deep into the green wood. She is fast, and revels in it.

" _ Allll _ you want to do is  _ fuck  _ me," she jeers him, dodging his swiping hand, and clambers up onto a fallen tree to escape him. "All you want to do is bend me over and put your cock in me, you - you pig!"

"I  _ will  _ bend you over and put my cock in you," he threatens, hauling himself up. "Just you watch."

Rey butts him with her spear so that he growls. She squeals with laughter when he scales the log to catch her, and darts down its length back onto the meadow, moss flying off under the drag of her feet. 

He will have - and would take - nothing she doesn't give to him, but being chased without risk or danger is still invigorating. 

Rey lets him catch her where she likes to lie, where the grass is sweet and soft, and he lets out a roar of victory when he snatches her up against him, spinning her about. 

She gasps, "You've caught me now - what will you do?" 

He growls, nearly stumbling in his desperation to lie her on the ground and bite her at the same time. "I'm going to eat your cunt."

Rey giggles as he fumbles with her shift. He puts her on her back and demands, "Take it off."

" _ You  _ take it off," she dares him, kicking at him lightly with her bare feet, and so he does, catching hold of her ankles in his other giant paw. "Don't! I like to kick. Especially on your back. When you fuck me."

He throws her shift away somewhere behind him. "Do you want me to fuck you?"

"Maybe," she says primly, but kicks his hand away and parts her thighs. Kylo's eyes blacken. He takes firm hold of her hips, cups her backside in his giant's hands, and licks her. 

He's good at quelling nervousness, and she imagines if she was horde-wild that she would so be nervous her hands would shake. This is how he would show her how much he could love her, at first - gentle, but perfect.

She imagines now that she is horde-wild and he is sea-wet, and imagines she is nervous, and imagines he is touching her for the first time with careful hands, licking her with a careful tongue. Rey looks at the sky, the trees, and thinks quite that, if she was horde-wild and afraid of him, that his tongue's insistent circling of her clit would help to dissipate her fear enormously.

When Rey has come twice, Kylo puts his hips against hers, cock heavy and rigid. It's a wordless way of asking, of telling, and she answers him by pulling him close to her, inviting. 

He pushes inside her easily. Every time she lets go of him, he grizzles, displeased; he  _ likes  _ to be held by her, likes to be pawed and stroked like some great pet. Rey strokes his hair experimentally, and when she stops he makes an unhappy sound, so petulant that it makes her laugh.

He takes her hands and places them firmly on his chest. "Stay," he insists.

She does, for a moment, until he is settled inside her, and then throws her arms back to circle her head. Kylo makes an indignant noise, squeezing her hips sharply.

She reaches and clutches at the generous mounds of his buttocks instead, giggling. 

"You have a big arse, you know. Like a girl."

He shows her his teeth, and she laughs. 

"You  _ do.  _ Big legs, too. Big everything."

"I'll show you big," Kylo growls, thrusting heavy.

"Yes, show me," she insists, letting go so that she can clutch the grass about her. "Show me how big you are."

He drops to his hands above her, and he is so big he darkens her sight. With one hand he takes up hers and slides it about his neck again, insistent on her frequent touch.

" _ Stay _ ," he orders, squeezing her wrist.

"I will."

He commands, "Love me."

_ Always.  _ Heat swells in her belly. "I  _ will, _ " she gasps, pulling him down so that his weight encompasses her, face in his hot neck under the heavy sun.

He's forceful, puffing. Rey clings to his back and paws, because it is all she can do not to forget where and what they are. All she can do is breathe, and feel.

Kylo puts her on her tummy, hefts her hips into the air. "Good?" he asks, before pushing into her again, hand smoothing down her back.

"Yes," she gasps, "yes, good."

She listens to him and imagines that every sound means something different; this sigh means  _ that feels good _ , that moan means  _ I love you,  _ and his low and urgent panting means  _ I'm going to come, I'm almost there, I can't hold on. _

__ When she imagines that every sound means something different, it seems almost as if they are speaking without words. She wonders if this is how it would be if she was horde-wild and he was sea-wet, Rey too frightened to speak and Kylo too cautious to make her.

_ Breathe _ , she imagines he would say to her in sounds, if they were both properly wild.  _ Doesn't that feel nice? You see - there's nothing to be frightened of. Just breathe for me. We'll go nice and slow til you're ready. _

__ Rey reaches between her thighs to touch herself, to stroke herself the way she learned to, and Kylo takes offense, batting her hand away to replace it with his own. She giggles, sighing. His touch is more unpredictable than her own, hands more intentioned for her pleasure. She bunches her fists in the grass and feels the weight of his thrusts increase.

__ Kylo's fluid instincts take him. He courses in and out of her, inexplicably big, but steady so that she is comfortable. Rey pants, cheek to the grass, huffing in broken breaths. Kylo grunts above her. She can hardly imagine how lovely it must feel for him, and whether he feels as she does; whether he feels the same delicious pressure in his belly, the liquid heat in his loins. 

Kylo groans, pace quickening. She imagines that it means  _ that feels nice, I don't want to stop, I'm nearly there. _

"I'm going to - Kylo, I'm almost-" she whines, when she is.

"Not yet," Kylo insists.

"I can't hold  _ on _ ."

" _ Try _ ," he commands, flushed and grunting, and the weight of his final few thrusts sends her over the edge and under the water, the sea of unimaginable heat and pleasure and good, wordless things.

The beast comes noisily, beautifully, though she can scarcely hear him over the roar of her blood in her ears. He puts his weight on her a moment, panting, and when she reaches blindly to kiss him he rolls them both to lie comfortably, chest to chest, Rey's leg drawn up over his hip.

A magpie is singing to its mate, who sings back, in the trees beyond the meadow green. Rey kisses Kylo all over his face, his neck - her own strange magpie's song, wordless - and he rumbles, contented.

She comes to rest at his shoulder, and exhales deeply, closing her eyes. "You're good at that."

"At what?" he rumbles.

"Fucking," Rey sighs.

"I know." He sounds like he's smiling. Rey listens to his horse's heart thump, slowing. 

When she feels she can, she lifts her head to look at him. He's beautiful, cheeks still pink, eyes soft and content. Rey pets his face, and he leans his face into her palm.

" _ Álainn, _ " she tells him.

He watches, a dark and sloe-eyed idol, cupping her rear in one great hand. She taps his neck, the faint lines of hidden lungs. 

"Show me these."

He huffs them open, closed, open again. She touches his mouth next. 

"And these."

Kylo shows her his teeth. She thumbs his plush upper lip, pushes it back, like she's buying a big shepherd-dog to look over a field. She examines these white teeth, feeling their edges push deep in the pads of her fingers.

"You'd be a good dog," she says, and he makes a soft sound: _never._ "You _would_. You have lovely teeth."

He grizzles at her, eyes soft.

"I think I need to have my seeds now," Rey murmurs, sighing. Kylo blinks his great dark eyes softly at her, and grumbles when she rolls away onto her hands and knees to reach her pack. "Don't grizzle at me."

He bends his head and kisses her exposed buttock. Rey laughs, and Kylo pushes his face into her rear, taking hold of her with both hands. He licks her there, where he hasn't licked her before, and when Rey feels it she squeaks and turns her head to look at him.

"What are you doing?"

He looks at her over the swell of her backside, his tongue still almost inside her. "No," she commands, trembling, and swats him. He sits up and grizzles. "You're a dog, you are. Can't even put my own arse in the air without you slobbering on it."

He smacks her rear and stands to stretch, yawning. Rey smiles and fills her mouth with seeds to chew.

"I think you'll like it when I do it again," he yawns, and his back pops as he stretches his shoulders.

"I liked it when you did it the first time, only we can only fuck for so long before I start running the risk of- well, of-"

"I know," he says, a little softer.

Rey fiddles with the bag, swallowing. 

"I'm not scared, you know."

"I know you aren't."

"I'm just - well, I don't know. Waiting for the right time. But I know it won't be  _ that _ way. I think about it all the time. I won't have seven and eight and nine babies, I won't be pregnant year in, year out, I'll just - I'll still be  _ me _ . And I like that."

He stands there naked, arms crossed about his chest, and asks her, “Is that what you want?”

“ _ Eventually _ .” She sits up and looks at him, never sure when she will become accustomed to quite how  _ big  _ he is. His arms are thick over his giant chest, and his white thighs are thicker still, framing his still-half-hard cock and its thatch of coarse dark hair.

"Then you'll have it." He stays where he is, and Rey can tell he likes her eyes on him, likes to preen and show her his bulk, his beauty.

"But," Rey says, hugging one knee loosely, "what about when they're hungry? If they're like you?"

Prideful, he asks, "What about it?"

" _ Kylo.  _ You know what I mean." 

He rolls his sloe eyes at her. Rey argues, “You can huff all you like, but think about it, Kylo. They can’t go attacking people from the town whenever they like.”

“No?” He comes to kneel where she is, and unceremoniously hauls her bottom into his lap. 

“ _ No, _ ” she says firmly, ignoring how he takes her thighs in hand. “No, they can’t, and that’s it.”

Squeezing, he chuckles, “You might get lucky. They could all be born like you.”

“I don’t know about that.” She lies back in the grass. It is cool and dry under her back."Maz said they're rare."

" _ Sons  _ are rare," Kylo tells her. "Daughters are different."

His bulk rears out the sun, and so she strokes his chest in the shadow. "And when you decide," he continues, "you can have just as many as you like."

“Not today,” she says, as if it will be tomorrow instead, or the day after. 

“No, not today,” he agrees, then huffs with pleasure as he fills her again, thighs up against hers. Rey’s breath catches in her throat. “But we ought to practice.”

“Yes, we should,” Rey tells him, and he knocks the breath clean out of her throat with his first thrust. “Until we get it perfect.”

He puts his weight on her, draws his thighs up under her hips, and as he sinks his teeth into her shoulder, he grunts, “That’ll take a lot of practice.”

“Good,” she gasps - and it is. It always is.

Having sex is simple, and wild, but stopping is the difficult part. Even Kylo gets worn out, and Rey, even in her newness, does the same. 

Kylo catches her a fat salmon in the river, rearing it clean out of the water with his bare hands, then disappears. Rey lights a fire with handfuls of dry grass, the sparks of two flints. The fish lies beside her, big and shiny, pink underbelly soft against its silver back.

Kylo appears again, hands full of strawberries with their delicate stems and glossy leaves still attached. He dumps them unceremoniously into her lap. 

"You know," Rey says, watching as he busies himself preparing the fish for her, "at home, when it's hot like this, strawberries grow  _ everywhere. _ I love them."

"Good." He tears open the fat salmon with his fingers and empties its innards into the stream. Rey watches, starting on a strawberry so big it covers her palm. 

"Are you excited to go back?" she asks him.

He pauses a moment, dunking the gutted fish in the running water. "I'm excited to have you all to myself."

Kylo insists on spitting the fish for her, and when she beams at him he butts his head against her shoulder, pleased, and curls himself about her, cradling her between his legs.

They sit in comfortable silence for a long time. They watch the fire lick up at the fish like waves, making it gold, as if it is simply leaping from a flaming sea. Kylo rests his head on Rey's shoulder and purrs, and she eats her berries and pets his hair. The fish starts to crisp, and she leans to turn it.

"Have you ever heard of the Salmon of Knowledge?" she asks him, knowing he hasn't. 

He butts his head softly against her shoulder again and tells her no. Rey looks at the fruit in her lap, blood-red and shiny.

"There's a river up north called the  _ Boann,  _ in  _ Mí _ , and there was a salmon in it, a special salmon."

"A special salmon," Kylo repeats, incredulous, accepting a fat strawberry when she puts it to his lips.

"It was special because it ate nine cobnuts from nine trees over the river. The nuts had all the knowing there ever was in them, and so then the salmon became full of all the knowledge in the world. Finegas was an old poet and wanted the knowledge all for himself, so he set to catching it. He spent seven years trying, and then one day he finally caught it." 

Rey has another strawberry and starts on her salmon, lifting it away from the fire by the end of the stick. It has been roasted crisp, silvery skin baked gold and dripping with oil. When she bites into its side, a droplet of oil runs down her chin. It does not burn her as once it might have.

"What happened when the poet caught the fish?"

She looks at the flaky pink flesh. "He had his boy-servant prepare it for him - Fionn Mac Cumhaill, you know - and so he cooked the salmon and he told Fionn to keep an eye on it, but not to dare eat it, any of it."

"And did he?"

"Just listen. He went off and left Fionn in charge of this salmon, to roast it and turn it and whatnot. Then Fionn saw that a bubble had risen up on the salmon's side, under its skin, so he went to pop it. It popped, but it burnt him, because of all the oil under the skin, and so he sucked on his finger, and he stole the knowledge from the salmon just by sucking his finger."

Kylo frowns. "Wait - just from sucking on his finger?"

"There was fish oil on his finger, wasn't there, so he still  _ ate _ some of it, even if it was just oil."

"So what did the old man do?"

Rey chews a great mouthful of fish, the stick slippery and warm with fat. "He came back and saw that the boy had knowledge in his eyes. He knew there was no point in having any himself, because in that drop of oil Finn swallowed there was more knowledge than anywhere else in the world, so he gave the boy the whole salmon to eat, and it gave him all the knowing in the world that ever was." She pauses to pull away the salmon's spine, and casts it into the stream, where the water pulls it down to the west.

"A fish that makes you knowing," Kylo muses. "What became of the boy, then?"

"Fionn Mac Cumhaill, Kylo. The Fianna?"

"Who?"

Rey shakes her head. "I'll tell you that another time. That's an even bigger story."

"Yes," he agrees, then asks: "Where is he now, this Fionn?"

"Well, dead, I suppose. Though I'm not sure. People like that don't really  _ die." _

"So a  _ fish  _ made him undying?"

"Maybe it did. I'm not so sure."

Kylo studies the spitted fish a moment. He bends, swipes it delicately with his thumb, and licks the pad of it. Rey watches, smiling. 

"You don't need a fish to make you undying," she reminds him. 

"No," he agrees, sitting up. "But it might make me know things."

"What are the things you want to know?"

"I don't know yet," he says gravely, and Rey laughs. 

They lie there a little while longer, warm in the sun, and then wander back down the river. The water there is soft and shimmering. Rey misses sand under her feet, but says nothing.

The days leading up to what the children of Epona call  _ Samanios  _ are good and hot. The forest is in full and wild bloom, and though the sun is baking, the river is beautifully cold on the skin. Rey misses the sea even so, but knows it is only days until she sees it again.

Ben is playing with the other children, splashing in the river, and the group of - indeed Rey thinks of them as such - friends they have amassed are resting on the riverbank, relaxing in the sun. 

“You still griping with that old mare?” Damaz asks Kylo, shifting a long leg aside so that Rey can sit.

“ _ If _ you could call it that.”

"Don't mind her. Those streamborns are fools."

"I don't mind _her_. I mind her stupid talk that she fills people with."

"I mind it, too,” Enfys grizzles, leaning against Yannic’s brown shoulder. “Fucking neck of it all. You know, Rey, in the bays we had old mares that slept under the sea, under the sand. They never ired people like that.”

“But,” Rey allows. “She told us of Ben.”

Kylo huffs. “That’s about it.”

“Just about.”

_ Not as strong as yours or Kylo's, but sight is sight. It'll do him good to learn to use it,  _ Leia had said. Rey wonders how the child's  _ lagadsklaer  _ will develop, and whether it could grow strong and clear.

Jyn joins them, arms full of cherries, and then someone speaks on something else, and so they sit and eat cherries and listen. It is not long before Ben calls for his father to play, and Damaz’s children call for theirs. Kylo obliges Ben, and within seconds of sliding down the bank into the river he is covered in giggling foals, Ben leading them, with Damaz not far behind. The foals take turns being launched, squealing, into the air, and diving sharply back into the river with splashes that spray Rey back up on the bank.

She wonders, idly, about children of her own.

"... I was only a colt then," she hears Cassian saying. "But I wasn't going to say  _ no,  _ was I? She was nearly twice my size. I was obsessed!"

"I like a big woman," Yannic replies idly. "Some of the  _ reungwerin  _ have great big thighs, you know, and tits like you've never seen before in your life."

"You dog," Enfys chuckles.

"Not half.”

They all look expectantly at Rey, as if waiting for her to grow hips and a great chest. 

"What?"

"Well, you look different to some of them. The young ones are little slips, but the others ...." Yannic puts his head back and sighs. "Shame. They never leave their fucking rocks, and when they do, they fuck off back to it as soon as they see you. How did Kylo manage to get his hands on you, Rey?"

Rey rubs her sun-hot cheek. "He tried to eat me," she recounts. "And then he decided not to, and then stayed with me instead." She pinches her hips. She has gained weight since knowing Kylo - five pounds, six - but she's still skinny. "I suppose I'm a bit different to them, maybe."

Rey observes Ben, sopping wet, who brandishes a newt at his father as they play and begs him to come hunt for more. Kylo goes, and Rey takes a notion to follow. She trails along the riverbank, smiling at foals and enjoying the sun. How  _ hot  _ the sun is here - at home, it is warm, but the warning chill of rain pervades the air always, no matter the season. Here she is free to bake as she pleases.

Damaz passes her with a child in his arms. "Finally free?"

"Oh, a little bit. I don't mind so much."

They walk with her to the edge of the river. The boy-child giggles, clinging to his father, and then squeals, "Up,  _ tadig _ !"

"Alright, little squirrel."

He ascends the tree with such ease that Rey nearly thinks to try it herself. He sets the child on the bough and hauls himself up after it.

"Where's Ilsa?" she calls up.

He beams. "Asleep. I'd sleep if I got that big with babe, too."

Rey rather thinks she'd enjoy that, too. "Might be it's twins," she suggests, smiling, and bends down to examine her spear. The dyed sinew is loosening there, where she has been clumsy and slipped it.

"Might be," he agrees. "Twins are good luck.”

“For you, maybe! Ilsa might not agree.”

“Maybe not, but we’ll soon find out. Has Kylo ever told you we were reared together, out in the bay?"

"No, never."

Damaz tells her, "I always knew he'd end up with one of your kind, you know. When we were foals he'd sit on the rocks for hours and watch for the  _ reunen  _ \- then when he was old enough to fight for himself he'd swim out to them all alone."

Rey leans on the trunk. "He told me that! About the selkies, and the  _ reungwir- _ "

The big man laughs. The child in his arms goes down and balances across the bough by herself. "We all did things like that," Damaz chuckles. "All of us. It's what you do when you're young. And what you do at the half-moon, but then that's making you young as well, just for one night."

Rey hesitates, hand on the bark. He asks, “You  _ are  _ going, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but I’ve never done - I’ve never done anything like  _ th _ at before.”

"Don't worry about it. Even Ilsa goes, and she's streamborn. She loves it."

"Do I have to- do I have to, uh-"

"You don't have to do anything. Likelihood is that you'll be too busy with Kylo or too drunk. Otherwise, do what you like."

"Too  _ drunk _ ?" Rey has never seen or heard a mention of drink amongst Kylo's kind; not once, not ever. It isn't like with Men, who drink all the time and sprawl drunk whenever they can.

“You didn’t know? Oh, I won’t spoil the surprise. The  _ kabell-touseg  _ will do that for you.”

He rushes forward, then, to save the child from hurling herself delightedly at the ground, and Rey focuses on her spear. She bends over it and winds the sinew back into place, cursing when it unravels itself again - purposely, she’s sure.

“Did you make that yourself?” someone asks.

Rey lifts her head. A pretty youth with golden-brown curls is beaming softly at her, lingering on the bank. He's young like she is; eighteen, nineteen. 

“You’re the  _ reunig-don-diabarzh _ , aren’t you?” he asks, and when she nods, he tells her: “You’re very beautiful. I’ve never seen one so close before.”

Rey looks at him and asks him, "What do you mean?"

He blinks his green eyes at her, golden lashes fluttering. He's streamborn, almost certainly. Rey can tell with the signs she has been taught; leaner, more sun-browned, prettier. 

"Well - I don't know. I've never met a  _ reunig _ before. Or been with one," he adds, eyes twinkling.

Her hackles rise. "See that you keep it that way, then," she says curtly. She likes this not; she knows that Kylo's kind are hardly given to forceful courtship, but that streamborns often get their own way with charm alone, and are unaccustomed to dismissal.

He sways, a little stunned, and then inquires, "Have I upset you?"

Rey knows she is safe. Her friends are nearby. Damaz is watching from the bough, and four foals are observing carefully from the riverbank. Yet she cannot help but be roughly reminded of men at home, men leering in the town; northmen approaching her at stalls to proposition her in their ugly tongues, Gaels thinking it apt to follow her brazenly, and all the while passerbys look and hear but say nothing. 

Instinct urges her to put her head down, scuttle away. She has heard stories. She has killed a man for the same.

She turns away, reaches for the loose sinew. “No. But you’re annoying me.”

His hand brushes her wrist. “Can I make it up to you?”

Rey draws herself back and slaps it away. The boy recoils.

"Keep your hands to yourself,  _ paotr-stêr _ ," Damaz warns from above her, "or they'll be pulled off you."

The streamborn looks up for the source of the voice, finds it, and scoffs. 

"By who? You?" His tone is a derisive one that Rey immediately dislikes. It sounds like a turn of voice reserved especially for saltborns; mocking and sly.

Damaz looks pityingly back at him, shaking his head so that his red hair falls from its loose braid. 

Rey tells the boy sharply, "Walk on, now, or I'll kick your arse for you."

He holds up his hands, and on one wrist hangs a delicate string of riverstones. "I didn't mean anything by it."

Rey sees Ben spot her from the river. He sits up on Kylo's shoulder, stares, and then nudges Kylo so that he will look, too. He does, and his eyes blacken, and he lets Ben slide off his shoulder so that he may rise up out of the river and do God-knows-what.

_ Fuck. _

__ “Sorry, again,” the pretty streamborn offers, and he  _ is  _ genuine, but she doesn’t care - he is only sorry because she is what she is. “You enjoy the sun, now.”

She doesn’t reply, only glares pointedly at him until he turns his back and goes.

Kylo has come silently up the bank, dark and sodden, a giant. Rey meets his gaze, thinks to distract him, and then thinks  _ No - no, let that little pretty shit know what never to do again. _

The streamborn does not notice Kylo at first, or perhaps does not take heed of him - perhaps he is used to the sight of big saltborns and no longer fears their presence - and foolishly walks right by him, daring even to look him boldly in the eye in his arrogant way.

Kylo catches hold of his throat in one great paw - stunning him as if he has walked into a branch - and slams him to the muck of the bank.

The colt’s smile disappears the second Kylo has hold of him. There is no struggle from both sides; only the  _ colt  _ thrashes, desperate to best a man twice his size, to preserve his boyish pride. Damaz lands beside Rey with a  _ thud  _ as he jumps from the tree, going to stand sentinel over the dispute by the river’s edge.

Kylo hurls the boy into the water; he hits it with a painful  _ slap,  _ sinks, and claws himself to the surface in a rage. He makes to strike Kylo, darting out with fists, and Kylo cracks him across the face with the back of his hand so forcefully that he goes flying back into the river.

It is a sight to see. Kylo is so  _ big;  _ skin white and gleaming with riverwater, sopping hair blacker than hell, flying out beside him as he hurls the boy bodily this way and that, besting, winning. The boy’s prettiness does not save him here, and so he resorts to kicking and pawing, showing his colt’s teeth.

“You don’t touch,” Kylo snarls. “You don’t speak. You don’t  _ look. _ ”

Rey thought that the foals would be upset, but even the little streamborns giggle and clap at this display. Ben scrambles to the edge of the bank to watch, awestruck and beaming.

One of the streamborn girls, brown-eyed and red-haired, murmurs to a friend, “You wouldn’t see our lot fight so much.”

Rey is tempted to tell her  _ no, you wouldn't, because you're soft as babes and sour as spurned queens, you horrible awful things _ , but holds her tongue.

Kylo sends the raging colt sprawling one last time, presents him with his back, and stalks out of the water.

Rey doesn't have the chance to speak; he takes her by the jaw and kisses her firmly, and then says, quite calmly, "Are you alright?"

"Yes," she says, holding his wrist. "Yes, I'm fine."

"I'll kill him if you want me to."

" _ No,  _ I don't want you to kill him," she exclaims. He studies her. "I'm fine."

"Good. Come." He takes her hand, starts to walk. Rey stops, pulling.

"Where are we going?"

He looks at her, eyes black in the way that they get when he wants her - all of her - and shows her so in a delightful and forceful way that often lasts hours, deep into the dark of night.

"Bring me, then," she says, as if he has spoken, and he does.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations: (Gaulish/Breton)  
>  **Reungwir **\- male selkie  
>  **Tadig **\- dad / father  
>  **Den maro **\- dead man  
>  **kelc'h **\- circle / coven  
>  **reuna **\- selkie woman  
>  **sallkeur **\- saltborn / literally 'of a salted heart'  
> **  
>  **Bez'an didrouz **\- be quiet  
>  **mamm-gozh **\- grandma / grandmother  
>  **me ga'r achanout **\- I love you  
>  **mammig **\- mam / mother  
>  **ebeul **\- foal / little one  
>  **razh **\- rats / idiots  
>  **reunig-don-diabarzh **\- selkie-come-inland  
>  **paotr-stêr **\- stream-boy  
>  **kabell-touseg **\- nightblooms (hallucinogenic mushrooms)  
>  Irish:  
>  **fearrón **\- male selkie  
>  **álainn **\- beautiful******************************************************************
> 
> My (permanent) Twitter is now @hagxnshall. Come say hi!


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